lunatic-rs: A Rust repository from Lunatic

This library allows you to build Rust applications that run on top of Lunatic.

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Why run on Lunatic?

Lunatic provides an Erlang-like runtime for all programming languages that compile to WebAssembly. It's all about spawning super lightweight processes, also known as green threads or go-routines in other runtimes. Lunatic processes are fast to create, have a small memory footprint and a low scheduling overhead. They are designed for massive concurrency.

Lunatic processes are completely isolated from each other, they have their own stack, heap and even syscalls. If one process fails it will not affect the rest of the system. This allows you to create powerful and fault-tolerant applications.

All processes running on lunatic are preemptively scheduled and executed by a work stealing async executor. This gives you the freedom to write simple blocking code, but the runtime is going to make sure it actually never blocks a thread if waiting on I/O.

To learn more about lunatic's architecture check out the runtime repository. It's written in Rust :)

Example

Spawning a new process is as simple as defining an entry function.

use lunatic::{spawn_link, Mailbox};

#[lunatic::main]
fn main(_: Mailbox<()>) {
    let child = spawn_link!(@task || {
        // This closure gets a new heap and stack to
        // execute on, and can't access the memory of
        // the parent process.
        println!("Hi! I'm a process.");
    });
    // Wait for child to finish
    let _ignore = child.result();
}

Check out more examples here.

Setup

To run the example you will first need to download the lunatic runtime by following the installation steps in this repository. The runtime is just single executable and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. If you have already Rust installed, you can get it with:

cargo install lunatic-runtime

Lunatic applications need to be compiled to WebAssembly before they can be executed by the runtime. Rust has great support for WebAssembly and you can build a lunatic compatible application just by passing the --target=wasm32-wasi flag to cargo, e.g:

# Add the WebAssembly target
rustup target add wasm32-wasi
# Build the app
cargo build --release --target=wasm32-wasi

This will generate a .wasm file in the target/wasm32-wasi/release/ folder inside your project. You can now run your application by passing the generated .wasm file to Lunatic, e.g:

lunatic target/wasm32-wasi/release/<name>.wasm

Better developer experience

To simplify developing, testing and running lunatic applications with cargo, you can add a .cargo/config.toml file to your project with the following content:

[build]
target = "wasm32-wasi"

[target.wasm32-wasi]
runner = "lunatic"

Now you can just use the commands you were already familiar with, such as cargo run, cargo test and cargo is going to automatically build your project as a WebAssembly module and run it inside lunatic.

Testing

Lunatic provides a macro #[lunatic::test] to turn your tests into processes. Check out the tests folder for examples.

Supported lunatic features

Some features are directly supported through Rust's standard library, like filesystem access (std::fs::File). Others are specific to lunatic, like process spawning (lunatic::Process).

Some features that are usually available in Rust's standard library (like TCP, e.g. std::net::TcpListener) are not standardized yet by WASI. So we made them available through this library (e.g. lunatic::net::TcpListener). Once WASI gets support for these features you will be able to just use the standard library instead.

What currently works:

Process creation (with this library)
Fine-grained process permissions (with this library)
Message passing between processes (with this library)
TCP networking (with this library)
Filesystem access
Environment variables
Distributed lunatic