Buffer in Rust with Mutex and Condvar

Question

I\'m trying to implement a buffer with a single consumer and a single producer. I have only used POSIX Semaphores, however, they\'re not available in Rust and I\'m trying to imp

Answer 1

I would encourage you to create smaller methods and reuse existing Rust types such as Option. This will allow you to simplify your code quite a bit — only one Mutex and one Condvar:

use std::thread;
use std::sync::{Arc, Condvar, Mutex};

#[derive(Debug, Default)]
struct Buffer {
    data: Mutex>,
    data_cv: Condvar,
}

impl Buffer {
    fn insert(&self, val: i32) {
        let mut lock = self.data.lock().expect("Can't lock");
        while lock.is_some() {
            lock = self.data_cv.wait(lock).expect("Can't wait");
        }
        *lock = Some(val);
        self.data_cv.notify_one();
    }

    fn remove(&self) -> i32 {
        let mut lock = self.data.lock().expect("Can't lock");
        while lock.is_none() {
            lock = self.data_cv.wait(lock).expect("Can't wait");
        }
        let val = lock.take().unwrap();
        self.data_cv.notify_one();
        val
    }
}

fn producer(buffer: &Buffer) {
    for i in 0..50 {
        println!("p: {}", i);
        buffer.insert(i);
    }
}

fn consumer(buffer: &Buffer) {
    for _ in 0..50 {
        let val = buffer.remove();
        println!("c: {}", val);
    }
}

fn main() {
    let buffer = Arc::new(Buffer::default());

    let b = buffer.clone();
    let p = thread::spawn(move || {
        producer(&b);
    });

    let b = buffer.clone();
    let c = thread::spawn(move || {
        consumer(&b);
    });

    c.join().expect("Consumer had an error");
    p.join().expect("Producer had an error");
}

---

If you wanted to have a bit more performance (benchmark to see if it's worth it), you could have Condvars for the "empty" and "full" conditions separately:

#[derive(Debug, Default)]
struct Buffer {
    data: Mutex>,
    is_empty: Condvar,
    is_full: Condvar,
}

impl Buffer {
    fn insert(&self, val: i32) {
        let mut lock = self.data.lock().expect("Can't lock");
        while lock.is_some() {
            lock = self.is_empty.wait(lock).expect("Can't wait");
        }
        *lock = Some(val);
        self.is_full.notify_one();
    }

    fn remove(&self) -> i32 {
        let mut lock = self.data.lock().expect("Can't lock");
        while lock.is_none() {
            lock = self.is_full.wait(lock).expect("Can't wait");
        }
        let val = lock.take().unwrap();
        self.is_empty.notify_one();
        val
    }
}