rust_minifb VS tokio

Well, it depends on how you use it; writing to an image buffer isn't much less efficient than writing to any normal buffer (in fact, although displaying your scene to a window efficiently is important, your main bottleneck will be the actual ray tracing loop). You may want to read this article for a practical example of using an ImageBuffer to create and draw a texture with Piston. Other window backends you could use, apart from pixels which was already mentioned in another comment, include minifb and Mini GL, though I haven't personally used them.

After watching the Numberphile video on this formula, I decided to implement it in Rust for fun. It uses minifb for the window creation + framebuffer.

Before I could implement the display output, I needed something to draw the images onto. There are quite a few Rust crates available to create a GUI window and update it with 2D graphics. Most of these are of course intended for making games, and also include ways of getting key presses as input, which I'll also need. I looked at Piston, which I've used before on other projects, Macroquad, which also supports web assembly as well as desktop targets, Pixels, which is intended specifically for 2D games, and Minifb, which is also specifically for 2D applications, but is much simpler. I also tried out libretro, which is specifically made for video game emulation, but I found it much more restrictive than the others because of it's narrow focus.

There's several different approaches you could take, but I'd probably suggest macroquad as the easiest. I've also used minifb for windowing + a drawing library like raqote or tiny-skia.

I don't know much about Rust, but I used the C version this library, and I think this is as simple as it gets: Rust MiniFB. Hope this helps

A very simple color manipulation library backed by a u32. My use-case was for use with minifb which uses a u32 frame buffer. Feedback appreciated.

If all you need is a pixel/frame buffer I'd suggest either pixels-rs or minifb.

In my experience, it really makes no difference what rendering backend you use for something as simple as a NES emulator. The 'pixel_renderer' that i wrote basically does the simplest possible thing i could think of - it takes a pixel buffer in cpu memory, copies it over to the gpu, turns it into a texture and stretches it to cover the entire screen. There seem to be many crates out there that do just this - my choice to roll my own was really one out of curiosity and completionism more than anything.

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).