sonic_client, the official Rust client for Sonic

This crate is a work in progress. API is subject to changes until it reaches 1.0.0. We won’t keep it in ZeroVer, don’t worry, but for now some pieces still need some polishing.

Features

• Lock free: No Mutex, RwLock…
• Performant: TCP streams are multiplexed using OS event queues (via mio) for optimal performance. Parsing is also minimal and aborts early to avoid needless computations.
• Lighweight: The library has only 7 dependencies, which are either essential or adding good performance benefits.
• Almost inert when idle: If no message should be sent and if no message is expected, sonic_client doesn’t execute a single line of code. No CPU time is wasted, it does the bare minimum.
• Ergonomic: All methods accept generic types so you don’t have to convert types or clone data needlessly.
• Type-safe: By construction, you can’t do unsound operations.
• Command buffering: Long commands are transparently split into smaller ones, depending on your Sonic server configuration. This way, you can PUSH megabytes of data without having to worry about Sonic buffer limits.
• Production-ready: sonic_client can be used at any scale. We benchmarked it by ingesting the English portion of Wikipedia, if that’s a good enough proof for you :)
• Future-proof: The library exposes a low-level API which you can use to send any command. If the Sonic Channel protocol gets updated but you can’t bump sonic_client for some reason, you’ll still have a way to do the new stuff.
• Resilient: One unexpected result or bad UTF-8 line does not prevent other events from being processed.
• No async runtime assumption: sonic_client can be used fully synchronously, but it also exposes an async API for use with any runtime.
• Safe: No unsafe, and unwraps/expects for performance in rare cases.
• Flexible logging: By default, sonic_client compiles with no log at all. However, you can enable std, log or tracing logs using feature flags.

Why another Rust client for Sonic?

sonic-channel by @pleshevskiy used to be the recommended Rust client, but it has been archived on Mar 1, 2023 signifying it won’t get updated in the future. While trying to use it in our benchmarks we noticed PONG is unsupported (although PING is… causing a failure every time it’s called) but more importantly ingested text is not escaped. This means any text containing a " breaks request parsing and causes ingestion to fail.

sonic_client by @FrontMage was also recommended by Sonic’s README, but while using it we noticed it logs passwords on START (!). In addition, the README says the crate is under development but last commit was made on Apr 11, 2019 so it’s safe to assume the crate is abandonned.

To address those issues and as part of modernizations we decided to insource the official Rust client. This will ensure its lifetime aligns with Sonic’s, and tests will ensure it always works (and at scale).

After reaching out to @FrontMage, he transferred us the ownership of his (abandonned) crate so we can reuse the name and avoid confusing situations. This is why this crate is published as pkg:cargo/sonic_client.