Guide: tasks

Author: steveklabnik

src/doc/guide.md

@@ -3626,6 +3626,152 @@ guide](http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide-pointers.html#rc-and-arc).
 
 # Tasks
 
+Concurrency and parallelism are topics that are of increasing interest to a
+broad subsection of software developers. Modern computers are often multi-core,
+to the point that even embedded devices like cell phones have more than one
+processor. Rust's semantics lend themselves very nicely to solving a number of
+issues that programmers have with concurrency. Many concurrency errors that are
+runtime errors in other languages are compile-time errors in Rust.
+
+Rust's concurrency primitive is called a **task**. Tasks are lightweight, and
+do not share memory in an unsafe manner, preferring message passing to
+communicate.  It's worth noting that tasks are implemented as a library, and
+not part of the language.  This means that in the future, other concurrency
+libraries can be written for Rust to help in specific scenarios.  Here's an
+example of creating a task:
+
+```{rust}
+spawn(proc() {
+    println!("Hello from a task!");
+});
+```
+
+The `spawn` function takes a proc as an argument, and runs that proc in a new
+task. A proc takes ownership of its entire environment, and so any variables
+that you use inside the proc will not be usable afterward:
+
+```{rust,ignore}
+let mut x = vec![1i, 2i, 3i];
+
+spawn(proc() {
+    println!("The value of x[0] is: {}", x[0]);
+});
+
+println!("The value of x[0] is: {}", x[0]); // error: use of moved value: `x`
+```
+
+`x` is now owned by the proc, and so we can't use it anymore. Many other
+languages would let us do this, but it's not safe to do so. Rust's type system
+catches the error.
+
+If tasks were only able to capture these values, they wouldn't be very useful.
+Luckily, tasks can communicate with each other through **channel**s. Channels
+work like this:
+
+```{rust}
+let (tx, rx) = channel();
+
+spawn(proc() {
+    tx.send("Hello from a task!".to_string());
+});
+
+let message = rx.recv();
+println!("{}", message);
+```
+
+The `channel()` function returns two endpoints: a `Receiver<T>` and a
+`Sender<T>`. You can use the `.send()` method on the `Sender<T>` end, and
+receive the message on the `Receiver<T>` side with the `recv()` method.  This
+method blocks until it gets a message. There's a similar method, `.try_recv()`,
+which returns an `Option<T>` and does not block.
+
+If you want to send messages to the task as well, create two channels!
+
+```{rust}
+let (tx1, rx1) = channel();
+let (tx2, rx2) = channel();
+
+spawn(proc() {
+    tx1.send("Hello from a task!".to_string());
+    let message = rx2.recv();
+    println!("{}", message);
+});
+
+let message = rx1.recv();
+println!("{}", message);
+
+tx2.send("Goodbye from main!".to_string());
+```
+
+The proc has one sending end and one receiving end, and the main task has one
+of each as well. Now they can talk back and forth in whatever way they wish.
+
+Notice as well that because `Sender` and `Receiver` are generic, while you can
+pass any kind of information through the channel, the ends are strongly typed.
+If you try to pass a string, and then an integer, Rust will complain.
+
+## Futures
+
+With these basic primitives, many different concurrency patterns can be
+developed. Rust includes some of these types in its standard library. For
+example, if you wish to compute some value in the background, `Future` is
+a useful thing to use:
+
+```{rust}
+use std::sync::Future;
+
+let mut delayed_value = Future::spawn(proc() {
+    // just return anything for examples' sake
+
+    12345i
+});
+println!("value = {}", delayed_value.get());
+```
+
+Calling `Future::spawn` works just like `spawn()`: it takes a proc. In this
+case, though, you don't need to mess with the channel: just have the proc
+return the value.
+
+`Future::spawn` will return a value which we can bind with `let`. It needs
+to be mutable, because once the value is computed, it saves a copy of the
+value, and if it were immutable, it couldn't update itself.
+
+The proc will go on processing in the background, and when we need the final
+value, we can call `get()` on it. This will block until the result is done,
+but if it's finished computing in the background, we'll just get the value
+immediately.
+
+## Success and failure
+
+Tasks don't always succeed, they can also fail. A task that wishes to fail
+can call the `fail!` macro, passing a message:
+
+```{rust}
+spawn(proc() {
+    fail!("Nope.");
+});
+```
+
+If a task fails, it is not possible for it to recover. However, it can
+notify other tasks that it has failed. We can do this with `task::try`:
+
+```{rust}
+use std::task;
+use std::rand;
+
+let result = task::try(proc() {
+    if rand::random() {
+        println!("OK");
+    } else {
+        fail!("oops!");
+    }
+});
+```
+
+This task will randomly fail or succeed. `task::try` returns a `Result`
+type, so we can handle the response like any other computation that may
+fail.
+
 # Macros
 
 # Unsafe