Crate fq 

A fast and simple ring-buffer-based single-producer, single-consumer queue with no dependencies. You can use this to write Rust programs with low-latency message passing.

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
fq = "0.0.4"

Quickstart

use fq::FastQueue;
use std::thread;

let (mut producer, mut consumer) = FastQueue::<String>::new(2);

let sender = thread::spawn(move || {
    producer.push("Hello, thread".to_owned())
        .expect("Unable to send to queue");
});

let receiver = thread::spawn(move || {
    while let Some(value) = consumer.next() {
        assert_eq!(value, "Hello, thread");
    }
});

sender.join().expect("The sender thread has panicked");
receiver.join().expect("The receiver thread has panicked");

How does it work?

The ring buffer structure allows for a contiguous data structure. The idea is that if we are able to get extreme cache locality, we can improve performance by reducing cache misses. This is also the reason why if you use smart pointers like Box<T>, performance may degrade since cache locality gets degraded. For very large T types, you are more limited by memcpy() performance and less from queue implementations. As such, ring buffers can be considered strongly optimized for data of a few word sizes with some non-linear performance degradation for larger sizes. Additional optimizations are provided for CPUs that support sse and prfchw instructions. As and when Rust std provides more relevant instructions, they will be added. This is simply a high-level explanation of some of the techniques employed by this crate, you can read the code to gain a better understanding of what’s happening under the hood.

Profiles

The crate is fully synchronous and runtime-agnostic. We are heavily reliant on std for memory management, so it’s unlikely that we will support #[no_std] runtimes anytime soon. You should be using the release or maxperf profiles for optimal performance.

Principles

• This crate will always prioritize message throughput over memory usage.
• This crate will always support generic types.
• This crate will always provide a wait-free and lock-free API.
• This crate will use unsafe Rust where possible for maximal throughput.

CPU Features

On x86 and x86_64 targets, prefetch instructions are available on the stable toolchain. To make use of prefetch instructions on the aarch64 target, you should enable the unstable feature and use the nightly toolchain.

[dependencies]
fq = { version = "0.0.4", features = ["unstable"] }

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are strictly difficult due to the nature of the program, it’s somewhat simple to do a same-CPU bench but performance will still be affected based on the core type and cache contention. Benchmarks are provided in the benches directory and can be run with cargo bench. Contributions via PRs for additional benchmarks are welcome.

Structs

Consumer

A consumer for the FastQueue. This is used to receive items from the queue.

FastQueue

A fast lock-free single-producer, single-consumer queue

Producer

A producer for the FastQueue. This is used to send elements to the queue.