tsyncp

Synchronization primitives over TCP for message passing.

Major rust libraries such as std and tokio provide great synchronization primitives to be used for message-passing between threads and tasks. However, there are not many libraries that provide similar APIs that can be used over the network.

Tsyncp tries to fill the gap by providing the similar APIs (mpsc, broadcast, barrier, etc) over TCP. If you have a project where it only has a few services running, and they need to pass some data to each other; instead of setting up a message-broker service, you can use tsyncp to easily pass data between them.

Tsyncp also allows customizing different Serialization/Deserialization methods to encode/decode data; currently, supported schemes straight from the library are Json, Protobuf, Bincode, Speedy, and Rkyv; however, users can very easily implement their own EncodeMethod and DecodeMethod.

Provided APIs

Currently, tsyncp provides 6 types of channels:

• mpsc: Multi-producer/single-consumer channel.
• broadcast: Sigle-producer/multi-consumer channel.
• barrier: Ensures multiple waiters wait for the barrier to release.
• spsc: Single-producer/single-consumer channel.
• channel: Generic single-connection channel for sending/receiving data. Can split into Sender and Receiver pair.
• multi_channel: Generic multi-connection channel for sending/receiving data. Can split into Sender and Receiver pair.

The API documentation has a very detailed guide on how to use the primitives. So please check them out!

Note: Tsyncp is built on tokio; and thus may not be compatible with other async runtimes like async-std.

Note: If you're worried about the quality of implementation and skills of the author, you shouldn't worry! (too much...) This library is a relatively thin layer on top of tokio::net::TcpStream for TCP, tokio_util::codec::Framed for byte stream framing, and serde, serde_json, Prost, etc. for serializing byte data! You can think of this library as a salad bowl made from the best ingredients in town and a light touch of homemade sauces.

That being said, I did add a couple of my own sauces into it. The two flavours that I added are:

• Very simple implementation of VariedLengthDelimitedCodec, which encodes/decodes varying header length depending on the size of the byte data.
• Minimal implementation of TCP stream pool StreamPool, which allows pushing and popping streams from the pool, streaming data from the pool, and broadcasting data into the pool.

You can take a look at the implementations of these, which both are pretty simple. And I tried my best not to put too much of my personal opinions into it!

But still, since this library is still a baby, if you find any concerns in the code, please contact me at jack.y.l.dev@gmail.com!

Warning: Tsyncp is not a message-broker nor it tries to be; it's just a message-passing library for simple and convenient use cases.

Warning: Tsyncp is still WIP! It's usable, but still needs some encode/decode features implemented, extensive testing, documentations, and examples.