This is the story of how James Munns and I designed and implemented (two versions!) of an high-perf lock-free ring-buffer for cross-thread communication. If any of those words look scary to you, don't fret, we'll explain everything from the basics.
Continue readingToday we're looking at the rust borrow checker from a different perspective. As you may know, the borrow checker is designed to safely handle memory allocation and ownership, preventing accessess to invalid memory and ensuring data-race freedom. This is a form of resource management: the borrow checker is tracking who's in charge of a chunk of memory, and who is currently allowed to read or write to it. In this post, we'll see how these facilities can be used to enforce higher-level API constraints in your libraries and software. Once you're familiar with these techniques, we'll cover how the same principles apply to advanced memory management and handling of other more abstract resources.
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