quiche VS tokio

The title of this post puts emphasis on "written in C", making me wonder when this would ever be a desirable feature, given that more secure implementations are available, and can be integrated into old C projects just as easily.

No need to rewrite everything from the ground up: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche#curl

The issue is dead silent too!

https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche/issues/1115

Even though Oxy is a proprietary project, we try to give back some love to the open-source community without which the project wouldn’t be possible by open-sourcing some of the building blocks such as https://github.com/cloudflare/boring and https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche.

They’ve been on the Rust train since at least 2019. Just look at projects like quiche, wrangler, and boringtun

It's more like Cloudflare forked nginx a long time ago, and is meanwhile in the very slow (like, decade-long) process of replacing it entirely.

The Cloudflare Workers Runtime, for instance, is built directly around V8; it does not use nginx or any other existing web server stack. Many new features of Cloudflare are in turn built on Workers, and much of the old stack build on nginx is gradually being migrated to Workers. https://workers.dev https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

In another part of the stack, there is Pingora, another built-from-scratch web server focused on high-performance proxying and caching: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...

Even when using nginx, Cloudflare has rewritten or added big chunks of code, such as implementing HTTP/3: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche And of course there is a ton of business logic written in Lua on top of that nginx base.

Though arguably, Cloudflare's biggest piece of magic is the layer 3 network. It's so magical that people don't even think about it, it just works. Seamlessly balancing traffic across hundreds of locations without even varying IP addresses is, well, not easy.

I could go on... automatic SSL provisioning? DDoS protection? etc. These aren't nginx features.

So while Cloudflare may have gotten started being more-or-less nginx-as-a-service I don't think you can really call it that anymore.

(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)

Ask Cloudflare why they use HTTP/3 and QUIC https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche.

Cloudflare has used rust for multiple projects in the past such as their QUIC/HTTP3 implementation Quiche and a WireGuard implementation BoringTun.

Being able to control nondeterminism is particularly useful for testing and debugging. This allows creating reproducible test environments, as well as discrete-event simulation for faster-than-real-time simulation of time delays. For example, Cardano uses a simulation environment for the IO monad that closely follows core Haskell packages; Sui has a simulator based on madsim that provides an API-compatible replacement for the Tokio runtime and intercepts various POSIX API calls in order to enforce determinism. Both allow running the same code in production as in the simulator for testing.

tokio / hyper / toml / serde / serde_json / json5 / console

tokio - An asynchronous runtime for Rust

3. Tokio

The AWS SDK makes use of the async capabilities in the Tokio library. So when you see async in front of a fn that function is capable of executing asynchronously.

Petar is also looking at implementing concurrency the way it is in Go to have a fully functional virtual machine as it is in the spec. This would likely attract more external contributors to developing the VM. One advantage of Rust is that, with the concurrency model, there is already an extensive library called Tokio which he can use. Petar stresses that this isn’t easy, but he believes it’s achievable, at least as a research topic around determinism and concurrency.

Another thing to point out is that async is a thing in Rust. I'm not going to begin to dive into this paradigm in this article, but know it's handled by the awesome Tokio framework.

So I started by using Tokio, a popular async runtime. The docs and samples helped me get a simple outbound TCP connection working. The Rust async book also had a lot of good explanations, both practical and digging into the details of what a runtime does.

Regarding the quote:

> The Original Sin of Rust async programming is making it multi-threaded by default. If premature optimization is the root of all evil, this is the mother of all premature optimizations, and it curses all your code with the unholy Send + 'static, or worse yet Send + Sync + 'static, which just kills all the joy of actually writing Rust.

Agree about the melodramatic tone. I also don't think removing the Send + Sync really makes that big a difference. It's the 'static that bothers me the most. I want scoped concurrency. Something like <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/2596>.

Another thing I really hate about Rust async right now is the poor instrumentation. I'm having a production problem at work right now in which some tasks just get stuck. I wish I could do the equivalent of `gdb; thread apply all bt`. Looking forward to <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/5638> landing at least. It exists right now but is experimental and in my experience sometimes panics. I'm actually writing a PR today to at least use the experimental version on SIGTERM to see what's going on, on the theory that if it crashes oh well, we're shutting down anyway.

Neither of these complaints would be addressed by taking away work stealing. In fact, I could keep doing down my list, and taking away work stealing wouldn't really help with much of anything.

The PHP <-> Rust bindings are provided by https://github.com/Nicelocal/ext-php-rs/ (our fork of https://github.com/davidcole1340/ext-php-rs with a bunch of UX improvements :).

php-tokio's integrates the https://revolt.run event loop with the https://tokio.rs event loop; async functionality is provided by the two event loops, in combination with PHP fibers through revolt's suspension API (I could've directly used the PHP Fiber API to provide coroutine suspension, but it was a tad easier with revolt's suspension API (https://revolt.run/fibers), since it also handles the base case of suspension in the main fiber).