Threading in Rust

6.1. Threading in Rust#

Similar to C, C++ and Java, Rust provides the ability to write multi-threaded programs which allows for concurrent execution of program code, and threads have the ability to read and write shared data, as we shall see soon.

Threading in rust is handled via the std::thread library, which provides the ability to spawn threads. The thread thread::spawn function call takes in a function closure, which is an anonmyous function with associated context that can be saved in a variable and passed to other functions. The following example spawns a single thread which prints 10 lines, while the main thread prints 5 lines, and these can run concurrently. The closure is defined as a parameter to thread::spawn using the || {} notation.

use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;

fn main() {
    let handle = thread::spawn(|| {
        for i in 1..=10 {
            println!("hi number {} from the spawned thread!", i);
            thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(1));
        }
    });

    for i in 1..=5 {
        println!("hi number {} from the main thread!", i);
        thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(1));
    }

    handle.join().unwrap();
}

The example also shows the use of thread:sleep to force a thread to stop its execution for sometime.

A call to the thread::spawn function returns a variable of type JoinHandle. This variable gives us a handle to the thread which we can use to interact with the thread and call the thread join() function. join forces the calling thread to wait for the execution of the thread pointed to by the handle to finish executing. In rust, when the main thread is done executing, the program exits, irrespective of any threads that have not finished executing, unless you force the execution to wait until all spawned threads have been joined using join.