Rust Threads

Introduction

Programming languages implement threads in a few different ways. Many operating systems provide an API for creating new threads. This model where a language calls the operating system APIs to create threads is sometimes called 1:1, meaning one operating system thread per one language thread.

Many programming languages provide their own special implementation of threads. Programming language-provided threads are known as green threads, and languages that use these green threads will execute them in the context of a different number of operating system threads. For this reason, the green-threaded model is called the M:N model: there are M green threads per N operating system threads, where M and N are not necessarily the same number.

Each model has its own advantages and trade-offs, and the trade-off most important to Rust is runtime support. Runtime is a confusing term and can have different meanings in different contexts.

In this context, by runtime we mean code that is included by the language in every binary. This code can be large or small depending on the language, but every non-assembly language will have some amount of runtime code. For that reason, colloquially when people say a language has “no runtime,” they often mean “small runtime.” Smaller runtimes have fewer features but have the advantage of resulting in smaller binaries, which make it easier to combine the language with other languages in more contexts. Although many languages are okay with increasing the runtime size in exchange for more features, Rust needs to have nearly no runtime and cannot compromise on being able to call into C to maintain performance.

The green-threading M:N model requires a larger language runtime to manage threads. As such, the Rust standard library only provides an implementation of 1:1 threading. Because Rust is such a low-level language, there are crates that implement M:N threading if you would rather trade overhead for aspects such as more control over which threads run when and lower costs of context switching, for example.

Examples

Creating a New Thread

use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
 
fn main() {
    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));
    }
}

Waiting for All Threads To Finish

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();
}

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

using move Closures

use std::thread;
 
fn main() {
    let v = vec![1, 2, 3];
 
    let handle = thread::spawn(move || {
        println!("Here's a vector: {:?}", v);
    });
 
    handle.join().unwrap();
}