The Rust Programming Language

Futures and the Async Syntax

The key elements of asynchronous programming in Rust are futures and Rust’s async and await keywords.

A future is a value which may not be ready now, but will become ready at some point in the future. (This same concept shows up in many languages, sometimes under other names such as “task” or “promise”.) Rust provides a Future trait as a building block so different async operations can be implemented with different data structures, but with a common interface. In Rust, we say that types which implement the Future trait are futures. Each type which implements Future holds its own information about the progress that has been made and what “ready” means.

The async keyword can be applied to blocks and functions to specify that they can be interrupted and resumed. Within an async block or async function, you can use the await keyword to wait for a future to become ready, called awaiting a future. Each place you await a future within an async block or function is a place that async block or function may get paused and resumed. The process of checking with a future to see if its value is available yet is called polling.

Some other languages also use async and await keywords for async programming. If you’re familiar with those languages, you may notice some significant differences in how Rust does things, including how it handles the syntax. That’s for good reason, as we’ll see!

Most of the time when writing async Rust, we use the async and await keywords. Rust compiles them into equivalent code using the Future trait, much as it compiles for loops into equivalent code using the Iterator trait. Because Rust provides the Future trait, though, you can also implement it for your own data types when you need to. Many of the functions we’ll see throughout this chapter return types with their own implementations of Future. We’ll return to the definition of the trait at the end of the chapter and dig into more of how it works, but this is enough detail to keep us moving forward.

That may all feel a bit abstract. Let’s write our first async program: a little web scraper. We’ll pass in two URLs from the command line, fetch both of them concurrently, and return the result of whichever one finishes first. This example will have a fair bit of new syntax, but don’t worry. We’ll explain everything you need to know as we go.

Our First Async Program

To keep this chapter focused on learning async, rather than juggling parts of the ecosystem, we have created the trpl crate (trpl is short for “The Rust Programming Language”). It re-exports all the types, traits, and functions you’ll need, primarily from the futures and tokio crates.

• The futures crate is an official home for Rust experimentation for async code, and is actually where the Future type was originally designed.

• Tokio is the most widely used async runtime in Rust today, especially (but not only!) for web applications. There are other great runtimes out there, and they may be more suitable for your purposes. We use Tokio under the hood for trpl because it’s well-tested and widely used.

In some cases, trpl also renames or wraps the original APIs to let us stay focused on the details relevant to this chapter. If you want to understand what the crate does, we encourage you to check out its source code. You’ll be able to see what crate each re-export comes from, and we’ve left extensive comments explaining what the crate does.

Create a new binary project named hello-async and add the trpl crate as a dependency:

$ cargo new hello-async
$ cd hello-async
$ cargo add trpl

Now we can use the various pieces provided by trpl to write our first async program. We’ll build a little command line tool which fetches two web pages, pulls the <title> element from each, and prints out the title of whichever finishes that whole process first.

Let’s start by writing a function that takes one page URL as a parameter, makes a request to it, and returns the text of the title element:

extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

fn main() {
    // TODO: we'll add this next!
}

use trpl::Html;

async fn page_title(url: &str) -> Option<String> {
    let response = trpl::get(url).await;
    let response_text = response.text().await;
    Html::parse(&response_text)
        .select_first("title")
        .map(|title_element| title_element.inner_html())
}

In Listing 17-1, we define a function named page_title, and we mark it with the async keyword. Then we use the trpl::get function to fetch whatever URL is passed in, and we await the response by using the await keyword. Then we get the text of the response by calling its text method, and once again await it with the await keyword. Both of these steps are asynchronous. For get, we need to wait for the server to send back the first part of its response, which will include HTTP headers, cookies, and so on. That part of the response can be delivered separately from the body of the request. Especially if the body is very large, it can take some time for it all to arrive. Thus, we have to wait for the entirety of the response to arrive, so the text method is also async.

We have to explicitly await both of these futures, because futures in Rust are lazy: they don’t do anything until you ask them to with await. (In fact, Rust will show a compiler warning if you don’t use a future.) This should remind you of our discussion of iterators back in Chapter 13. Iterators do nothing unless you call their next method—whether directly, or using for loops or methods such as map which use next under the hood. With futures, the same basic idea applies: they do nothing unless you explicitly ask them to. This laziness allows Rust to avoid running async code until it’s actually needed.

Once we have response_text, we can then parse it into an instance of the Html type using Html::parse. Instead of a raw string, we now have a data type we can use to work with the HTML as a richer data structure. In particular, we can use the select_first method to find the first instance of a given CSS selector. By passing the string "title", we’ll get the first <title> element in the document, if there is one. Because there may not be any matching element, select_first returns an Option<ElementRef>. Finally, we use the Option::map method, which lets us work with the item in the Option if it’s present, and do nothing if it isn’t. (We could also use a match expression here, but map is more idiomatic.) In the body of the function we supply to map, we call inner_html on the title_element to get its content, which is a String. When all is said and done, we have an Option<String>.

Notice that Rust’s await keyword goes after the expression you’re awaiting, not before it. That is, it’s a postfix keyword. This may be different from what you might be used to if you have used async in other languages. Rust chose this because it makes chains of methods much nicer to work with. As a result, we can change the body of page_url_for to chain the trpl::get and text function calls together with await between them, as shown in Listing 17-2:

extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

use trpl::Html;

fn main() {
    // TODO: we'll add this next!
}

async fn page_title(url: &str) -> Option<String> {
    let response_text = trpl::get(url).await.text().await;
    Html::parse(&response_text)
        .select_first("title")
        .map(|title_element| title_element.inner_html())
}

With that, we have successfully written our first async function! Before we add some code in main to call it, let’s talk a little more about what we’ve written and what it means.

When Rust sees a block marked with the async keyword, it compiles it into a unique, anonymous data type which implements the Future trait. When Rust sees a function marked with async, it compiles it into a non-async function whose body is an async block. An async function’s return type is the type of the anonymous data type the compiler creates for that async block.

Thus, writing async fn is equivalent to writing a function which returns a future of the return type. When the compiler sees a function definition such as the async fn page_title in Listing 17-1, it’s equivalent to a non-async function defined like this:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test
use std::future::Future;
use trpl::Html;

fn page_title(url: &str) -> impl Future<Output = Option<String>> + '_ {
    async move {
        let text = trpl::get(url).await.text().await;
        Html::parse(&text)
            .select_first("title")
            .map(|title| title.inner_html())
    }
}
}

Let’s walk through each part of the transformed version:

• It uses the impl Trait syntax we discussed back in the “Traits as Parameters” section in Chapter 10.
• The returned trait is a Future, with an associated type of Output. Notice that the Output type is Option<String>, which is the same as the the original return type from the async fn version of page_title.
• All of the code called in the body of the original function is wrapped in an async move block. Remember that blocks are expressions. This whole block is the expression returned from the function.
• This async block produces a value with the type Option<String>, as described above. That value matches the Output type in the return type. This is just like other blocks you have seen.
• The new function body is an async move block because of how it uses the url parameter. (We’ll talk about async vs. async move much more later in the chapter.)
• The new version of the function has a kind of lifetime we haven’t seen before in the output type: '_. Because the function returns a Future which refers to a reference—in this case, the reference from the url parameter—we need to tell Rust that we mean for that reference to be included. We don’t have to name the lifetime here, because Rust is smart enough to know there is only one reference which could be involved, but we do have to be explicit that the resulting Future is bound by that lifetime.

Now we can call page_title in main. To start, we’ll just get the title for a single page. In Listing 17-3, we follow the same pattern we used for getting command line arguments back in Chapter 12. Then we pass the first URL page_title, and await the result. Because the value produced by the future is an Option<String>, we use a match expression to print different messages to account for whether the page had a <title>.

extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

use trpl::Html;

async fn main() {
    let args: Vec<String> = std::env::args().collect();
    let url = &args[1];
    match page_title(url).await {
        Some(title) => println!("The title for {url} was {title}"),
        None => println!("{url} had no title"),
    }
}

async fn page_title(url: &str) -> Option<String> {
    let response_text = trpl::get(url).await.text().await;
    Html::parse(&response_text)
        .select_first("title")
        .map(|title_element| title_element.inner_html())
}

Unfortunately, this doesn’t compile. The only place we can use the await keyword is in async functions or blocks, and Rust won’t let us mark the special main function as async.

error[E0752]: `main` function is not allowed to be `async`
 --> src/main.rs:6:1
  |
6 | async fn main() {
  | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ `main` function is not allowed to be `async`

The reason main can’t be marked async is that async code needs a runtime: a Rust crate which manages the details of executing asynchronous code. A program’s main function can initialize a runtime, but it’s not a runtime itself. (We’ll see more about why this is a bit later.) Every Rust program that executes async code has at least one place where it sets up a runtime and executes the futures.

Most languages which support async bundle a runtime with the language. Rust does not. Instead, there are many different async runtimes available, each of which makes different tradeoffs suitable to the use case they target. For example, a high-throughput web server with many CPU cores and a large amount of RAM has very different needs than a microcontroller with a single core, a small amount of RAM, and no ability to do heap allocations. The crates which provide those runtimes also often supply async versions of common functionality such as file or network I/O.

Here, and throughout the rest of this chapter, we’ll use the run function from the trpl crate, which takes a future as an argument and runs it to completion. Behind the scenes, calling run sets up a runtime to use to run the future passed in. Once the future completes, run returns whatever value the future produced.

We could pass the future returned by page_title directly to run. Once it completed, we would be able to match on the resulting Option<String>, the way we tried to do in Listing 17-3. However, for most of the examples in the chapter (and most async code in the real world!), we’ll be doing more than just one async function call, so instead we’ll pass an async block and explicitly await the result of calling page_title, as in Listing 17-4.

extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

use trpl::Html;

fn main() {
    let args: Vec<String> = std::env::args().collect();

    trpl::run(async {
        let url = &args[1];
        match page_title(url).await {
            Some(title) => println!("The title for {url} was {title}"),
            None => println!("{url} had no title"),
        }
    })
}

async fn page_title(url: &str) -> Option<String> {
    let response_text = trpl::get(url).await.text().await;
    Html::parse(&response_text)
        .select_first("title")
        .map(|title_element| title_element.inner_html())
}

When we run this, we get the behavior we might have expected initially:

$ cargo run -- https://www.rust-lang.org
    Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.05s
     Running `target/debug/async_await 'https://www.rust-lang.org'`
The title for https://www.rust-lang.org was
            Rust Programming Language

Phew: we finally have some working async code! This now compiles, and we can run it. Before we add code to race two sites against each other, let’s briefly turn our attention back to how futures work.

Each await point—that is, every place where the code uses the await keyword—represents a place where control gets handed back to the runtime. To make that work, Rust needs to keep track of the state involved in the async block, so that the runtime can kick off some other work and then come back when it’s ready to try advancing this one again. This is an invisible state machine, as if you wrote an enum in this way to save the current state at each await point:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

enum PageTitleFuture<'a> {
    Initial { url: &'a str },
    GetAwaitPoint { url: &'a str },
    TextAwaitPoint { response: trpl::Response },
}
}

Writing the code to transition between each state by hand would be tedious and error-prone, especially when adding more functionality and more states to the code later. Instead, the Rust compiler creates and manages the state machine data structures for async code automatically. If you’re wondering: yep, the normal borrowing and ownership rules around data structures all apply. Happily, the compiler also handles checking those for us, and has good error messages. We’ll work through a few of those later in the chapter!

Ultimately, something has to execute that state machine. That something is a runtime. (This is why you may sometimes come across references to executors when looking into runtimes: an executor is the part of a runtime responsible for executing the async code.)

Now we can understand why the compiler stopped us from making main itself an async function back in Listing 17-3. If main were an async function, something else would need to manage the state machine for whatever future main returned, but main is the starting point for the program! Instead, we call the trpl::run function in main, which sets up a runtime and runs the future returned by the async block until it returns Ready.

Let’s put these pieces together and see how we can write concurrent code, by calling page_title with two different URLs passed in from the command line and racing them.

extern crate trpl; // required for mdbook test

use trpl::{Either, Html};

fn main() {
    let args: Vec<String> = std::env::args().collect();

    trpl::run(async {
        let title_fut_1 = page_title(&args[1]);
        let title_fut_2 = page_title(&args[2]);

        let (url, maybe_title) =
            match trpl::race(title_fut_1, title_fut_2).await {
                Either::Left(left) => left,
                Either::Right(right) => right,
            };

        println!("{url} returned first");
        match maybe_title {
            Some(title) => println!("Its page title is: '{title}'"),
            None => println!("Its title could not be parsed."),
        }
    })
}

async fn page_title(url: &str) -> (&str, Option<String>) {
    let text = trpl::get(url).await.text().await;
    let title = Html::parse(&text)
        .select_first("title")
        .map(|title| title.inner_html());
    (url, title)
}

In Listing 17-5, we begin by calling page_title for each of the user-supplied URLs. We save the futures produced by calling page_title as title_fut_1 and title_fut_2. Remember, these don’t do anything yet, because futures are lazy, and we haven’t yet awaited them. Then we pass the futures to trpl::race, which returns a value to indicate which of the futures passed to it finishes first.

Either future can legitimately “win,” so it doesn’t make sense to return a Result. Instead, race returns a type we haven’t seen before, trpl::Either. The Either type is somewhat similar to a Result, in that it has two cases. Unlike Result, though, there is no notion of success or failure baked into Either. Instead, it uses Left and Right to indicate “one or the other”.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
enum Either<A, B> {
    Left(A),
    Right(B),
}
}

The race function returns Left if the first argument finishes first, with that future’s output, and Right with the second future argument’s output if that one finishes first. This matches the order the arguments appear when calling the function: the first argument is to the left of the second argument.

We also update page_title to return the same URL passed in. That way, if the page which returns first does not have a <title> we can resolve, we can still print a meaningful message. With that information available, we wrap up by updating our println! output to indicate both which URL finished first and what the <title> was for the web page at that URL, if any.

You have built a small working web scraper now! Pick a couple URLs and run the command line tool. You may discover that some sites are reliably faster than others, while in other cases which site “wins” varies from run to run. More importantly, you’ve learned the basics of working with futures, so we can now dig into even more of the things we can do with async.