Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice

From the Preface

Rust has played, and keeps playing, a significant role in making systems programming more accessible. However, low-level concurrency topics such as atomics and memory ordering are still often thought of as somewhat mystical subjects that are best left to a very small group of experts.

While working on Rust-based real-time control systems and the Rust standard library over the past few years, I found that many of the available resources on atomics and related topics only cover a small part of the information I was looking for. Many resources focus entirely on C and C++, which can make it hard to form the connection with Rust’s concept of (memory and thread) safety and type system. The resources that cover the details of the abstract theory, like C++’s memory model, often only vaguely explain how it relates to actual hardware, if at all. There are many resources that cover every detail of the actual hardware, such as processor instructions and cache coherency, but forming a holistic understanding often requires collecting bits and pieces of information from many different places.

This book is an attempt to put relevant information in one place, connecting it all together, providing everything you need to build your own correct, safe, and ergonomic concurrency primitives, while understanding enough about the underlying hardware and the role of the operating system to be able to make design decisions and basic optimization trade-offs.