crossmist

crossmist provides efficient and seamless cross-process communication for Rust. It provides semantics similar to std::thread::spawn and single-producer single-consumer channels, both synchronously and asynchronously.

Installation

$ cargo add crossmist

Or add the following to your Cargo.toml:

crossmist = "1.0"

Documentation

Check out docs.rs.

Motivational examples

This crate allows you to easily perform computations in another process without creating a separate executable or parsing command line arguments manually. For example, the simplest example, computing a sum of several numbers in a one-shot subprocess, looks like this:

#[crossmist::main]
fn main() {
    println!("5 + 7 = {}", add.run(vec![5, 7]).unwrap());
}

#[crossmist::func]
fn add(nums: Vec<i32>) -> i32 {
    nums.into_iter().sum()
}

This crate also supports long-lived tasks with constant cross-process communication:

#[crossmist::main]
fn main() {
    let (mut ours, theirs) = crossmist::duplex().unwrap();
    add.spawn(theirs).expect("Failed to spawn child");
    for i in 1..=5 {
        for j in 1..=5 {
            println!("{i} + {j} = {}", ours.request(&vec![i, j]).unwrap());
        }
    }
}

#[crossmist::func]
fn add(mut chan: crossmist::Duplex<i32, Vec<i32>>) {
    while let Some(nums) = chan.recv().unwrap() {
        chan.send(&nums.into_iter().sum());
    }
}

Almost arbitrary objects can be passed between processes and across channels, including file handles, sockets, and other channels.