libpnet VS MIO

Hey, I'm looking for the best way to do packet capture in Rust. I've looked at both libpnet and pcap crates, and they both seem way less mature and with less functionality than the PcapPlusPlus library, which seems to be the golden suite of packet capture and manipulation.

> I mentioned really briefly that tcpdump lets you save pcap files. This is awesome because literally every network analysis tool in the universe understands pcap files. pcap files are like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Everybody loves them.

OMG, yes, very well put. When I get a bug report with a pcap file I know I'll be able to know exactly what happened.

Speaking of which: for one of my libraries, I want to make a diagnostic tool that replays an interaction. My library mostly operates at the TCP level (also some UDP), so I need to reconstruct the TCP flows in my tool to feed to my library. Either I need an easy-to-use Rust library to do that directly from pcap files [1] or some format that represents bytes moving over the flow (like sets of lines with a timestamp, flow id, and pretty hexdump of the bytes) with a tool that produces it from pcap. This seems like something that should exist? Wireshark's “Analyze > Follow > TCP Stream”’s “Save As…” with "hex dump" is kind of what I want, but it doesn't have timestamps, and it doesn't have a way to put everything (multiple flows, UDP packets also) in one file.

[1] https://crates.io/crates/pnet looks promising but it wasn't as obvious as I hoped how to plug it in for what I want.

libpnet provides a cross-platform API for low level networking using Rust.

Was playing around with mio (https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio) (not that mio itself is very important here!) and was trying to implement a simple something that I've done in java before: a Reactor that you can register ReactorClients with that will get callback whenever there are events on the corresponding socket etc.

How does it compare to mio?

TcpStream gets its wake behavior by delegating to the fd wakers. The Unix wakers have a few implementations, for different platforms. On Linux and Android, epoll is used.

The real implementation details of the I/O event queue is done in mio as u/hniksic pointed out, but that's more comparable with libuv which is certainly a huge part of the Node runtime. mio and libuv have a lot of similarities (at least they used to).

My example was "twice by one developer", not "twice across all indexed repos."

A spot check shows that quite a few in your link are used specifically to ensure correct handling of Rust multi-level breaks work syntax, like https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/blob/master/crate... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/blob/master/tests/sourc... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/tools/rust... , https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/tools/rust... and likely more.

Another is a translation of BASIC code to Rust, using break as a form of goto. https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games/blob/e...

The example at https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/master/tests/tcp.rs is a nice one

    // Wait for our TCP stream to connect

In my program, I have about 6 different components that follow the pattern below. Basically, the components run a thread while polling on crossbeam channels, file descriptors or sockets. For polling, I am using Mio (https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio).

On the code side it's pretty much the same as C++. You have a module that defines an interface and per-platform implementations that are included depending on a "configuration conditional checks" #[cfg(target_os = "linux")] macro.

https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/c6b5f13adf67483d927b176...

Made possible by Wasi support for Mio https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/pull/1576

Indeed! In practice it's done through the polling operation: instead of a separate poll for op1 and op2, the program essentially tells the OS "wake me when either op1 or op2 is ready" (through the epoll syscall on Linux). The mio crate implements this, and the example on the readme is basically the same loop, but written with this polling strategy in mind.