Understanding Futurelock in Rust Programming: How It Defeats Local Reasoning About Correctness
By
bcantrill
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
Summary
The article discusses 'futurelock' in Rust programming, which is a problem similar to async cancellation that defeats Rust's goal of enabling local reasoning about correctness. Futurelock occurs when combining multiple components that individually seem correct but together create deadlock issues, particularly with Mutexes that might be buried deep in the codebase across different modules or packages. The article explains that there's no single abstraction or programming pattern to avoid, requiring developers to examine multiple layers of the stack simultaneously to identify these issues.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledfuturelock defeats Rust's goal of being able to reason locally about correctness
None of these by itself is wrong, but combining them results in futurelock
It could require looking across many layers of the stack at once to be able to see the problem
There's no one abstraction, construct, or programming pattern we can point to here and say 'never do this'
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