Designing the Thread Pool Interface

Let’s talk about what using the pool should look like. The authors often find that when trying to design some code, writing the client interface first can really help guide your design. Write the API of the code to be structured in the way you’d want to call it, then implement the functionality within that structure rather than implementing the functionality then designing the public API.

Similar to how we used Test Driven Development in the project in Chapter 12, we’re going to use Compiler Driven Development here. We’re going to write the code that calls the functions we wish we had, then we’ll lean on the compiler to tell us what we should change next. The compiler error messages will guide our implementation.

Code Structure if We Could Use `thread::spawn`

First, let’s explore what the code to create a new thread for every connection could look like. This isn’t our final plan due to the problems with potentially spawning an unlimited number of threads that we talked about earlier, but it’s a start. Listing 20-11 shows the changes to main to spawn a new thread to handle each stream within the for loop:

Filename: src/main.rs

# use std::thread;
# use std::io::prelude::*;
# use std::net::TcpListener;
# use std::net::TcpStream;
#
fn main() {
    let listener = TcpListener::bind("127.0.0.1:8080").unwrap();

    for stream in listener.incoming() {
        let stream = stream.unwrap();

        thread::spawn(|| {
            handle_connection(stream);
        });
    }
}
# fn handle_connection(mut stream: TcpStream) {}

Listing 20-11: Spawning a new thread for each stream

As we learned in Chapter 16, thread::spawn will create a new thread and then run the code in the closure in it. If you run this code and load /sleep and then / in two browser tabs, you’ll indeed see the request to / doesn’t have to wait for /sleep to finish. But as we mentioned, this will eventually overwhelm the system since we’re making new threads without any limit.

Creating a Similar Interface for `ThreadPool`

We want our thread pool to work in a similar, familiar way so that switching from threads to a thread pool doesn’t require large changes to the code we want to run in the pool. Listing 20-12 shows the hypothetical interface for a ThreadPool struct we’d like to use instead of thread::spawn:

Filename: src/main.rs

# use std::thread;
# use std::io::prelude::*;
# use std::net::TcpListener;
# use std::net::TcpStream;
# struct ThreadPool;
# impl ThreadPool {
#    fn new(size: u32) -> ThreadPool { ThreadPool }
#    fn execute<F>(&self, f: F)
#        where F: FnOnce() + Send + 'static {}
# }
#
fn main() {
    let listener = TcpListener::bind("127.0.0.1:8080").unwrap();
    let pool = ThreadPool::new(4);

    for stream in listener.incoming() {
        let stream = stream.unwrap();

        pool.execute(|| {
            handle_connection(stream);
        });
    }
}
# fn handle_connection(mut stream: TcpStream) {}

Listing 20-12: How we want to be able to use the ThreadPool we’re going to implement

We use ThreadPool::new to create a new thread pool with a configurable number of threads, in this case four. Then, in the for loop, pool.execute will work in a similar way to thread::spawn.

Compiler Driven Development to Get the API Compiling

Go ahead and make the changes in Listing 20-12 to src/main.rs, and let’s use the compiler errors to drive our development. Here’s the first error we get:

$ cargo check
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///projects/hello)
error[E0433]: failed to resolve. Use of undeclared type or module `ThreadPool`
  --> src\main.rs:10:16
   |
10 |     let pool = ThreadPool::new(4);
   |                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Use of undeclared type or module
   `ThreadPool`

error: aborting due to previous error

Great, we need a ThreadPool. Let’s switch the hello crate from a binary crate to a library crate to hold our ThreadPool implementation, since the thread pool implementation will be independent of the particular kind of work that we’re doing in our web server. Once we’ve got the thread pool library written, we could use that functionality to do whatever work we want to do, not just serve web requests.

So create src/lib.rs that contains the simplest definition of a ThreadPool struct that we can have for now:

Filename: src/lib.rs

pub struct ThreadPool;

Then create a new directory, src/bin, and move the binary crate rooted in src/main.rs into src/bin/main.rs. This will make the library crate be the primary crate in the hello directory; we can still run the binary in src/bin/main.rs using cargo run though. After moving the main.rs file, edit it to bring the library crate in and bring ThreadPool into scope by adding this at the top of src/bin/main.rs:

Filename: src/bin/main.rs

extern crate hello;
use hello::ThreadPool;

And try again in order to get the next error that we need to address:

$ cargo check
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///projects/hello)
error: no associated item named `new` found for type `hello::ThreadPool` in the
current scope
  --> src\main.rs:13:16
   |
13 |     let pool = ThreadPool::new(4);
   |                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   |

Cool, the next thing is to create an associated function named new for ThreadPool. We also know that new needs to have one parameter that can accept 4 as an argument, and new should return a ThreadPool instance. Let’s implement the simplest new function that will have those characteristics:

Filename: src/lib.rs

pub struct ThreadPool;

impl ThreadPool {
    pub fn new(size: u32) -> ThreadPool {
        ThreadPool
    }
}

We picked u32 as the type of the size parameter, since we know that a negative number of threads makes no sense. u32 is a solid default. Once we actually implement new for real, we’ll reconsider whether this is the right choice for what the implementation needs, but for now, we’re just working through compiler errors.

Let’s check the code again:

$ cargo check
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///projects/hello)
warning: unused variable: `size`, #[warn(unused_variables)] on by default
 --> src/lib.rs:4:16
  |
4 |     pub fn new(size: u32) -> ThreadPool {
  |                ^^^^

error: no method named `execute` found for type `hello::ThreadPool` in the
current scope
  --> src/main.rs:18:14
   |
18 |         pool.execute(|| {
   |              ^^^^^^^

Okay, a warning and an error. Ignoring the warning for a moment, the error is because we don’t have an execute method on ThreadPool. Let’s define one, and we need it to take a closure. If you remember from Chapter 13, we can take closures as arguments with three different traits: Fn, FnMut, and FnOnce. What kind of closure should we use? Well, we know we’re going to end up doing something similar to thread::spawn; what bounds does the signature of thread::spawn have on its argument? Let’s look at the documentation, which says:

pub fn spawn<F, T>(f: F) -> JoinHandle<T>
    where
        F: FnOnce() -> T + Send + 'static,
        T: Send + 'static

F is the parameter we care about here; T is related to the return value and we’re not concerned with that. Given that spawn uses FnOnce as the trait bound on F, it’s probably what we want as well, since we’ll eventually be passing the argument we get in execute to spawn. We can be further confident that FnOnce is the trait that we want to use since the thread for running a request is only going to execute that request’s closure one time.

F also has the trait bound Send and the lifetime bound 'static, which also make sense for our situation: we need Send to transfer the closure from one thread to another, and 'static because we don’t know how long the thread will execute. Let’s create an execute method on ThreadPool that will take a generic parameter F with these bounds:

Filename: src/lib.rs

# pub struct ThreadPool;
impl ThreadPool {
    // ...snip...

    pub fn execute<F>(&self, f: F)
        where
            F: FnOnce() + Send + 'static
    {

    }
}

The FnOnce trait still needs the () after it since this FnOnce is representing a closure that takes no parameters and doesn’t return a value. Just like function definitions, the return type can be omitted from the signature, but even if we have no parameters, we still need the parentheses.

Again, since we’re working on getting the interface compiling, we’re adding the simplest implementation of the execute method, which does nothing. Let’s check again:

$ cargo check
   Compiling hello v0.1.0 (file:///projects/hello)
warning: unused variable: `size`, #[warn(unused_variables)] on by default
 --> src/lib.rs:4:16
  |
4 |     pub fn new(size: u32) -> ThreadPool {
  |                ^^^^

warning: unused variable: `f`, #[warn(unused_variables)] on by default
 --> src/lib.rs:8:30
  |
8 |     pub fn execute<F>(&self, f: F)
  |                              ^

Only warnings now! It compiles! Note that if you try cargo run and making a request in the browser, though, you’ll see the errors in the browser again that we saw in the beginning of the chapter. Our library isn’t actually calling the closure passed to execute yet!

A saying you might hear about languages with strict compilers like Haskell and Rust is “if the code compiles, it works.” This is a good time to remember that this is just a phrase and a feeling people sometimes have, it’s not actually universally true. Our project compiles, but it does absolutely nothing! If we were building a real, complete project, this would be a great time to start writing unit tests to check that the code compiles and has the behavior we want.

Designing the Thread Pool Interface