alt Hacker NewsI will personally recommend that unless you are writing performance sensitive code*, don’t use mutexes at all because they are too low-level an abstraction. Use MPSC queues for example, or something like RCU. I find these abstractions much more developer friendly.
*: You may be, since you are using Rust.
Replies
jltsiren • yesterday at 8:24 PM
A mutex is a natural abstraction when there is exactly one of them. You have a bunch of tasks doing their own stuff, with shared mutable state behind the mutex. When you start thinking about using two mutexes, other abstractions often become more convenient.
I have found out that mutex solutions are more maintainable and amendable without big redesigns compared with channels or RCU.
Consider a simple case of single producer-single consumer. While one can use bounded channels to implement back-pressure, in practice when one wants to either drop messages or apply back-pressure based on message priority any solution involving channels will lead to pile of complex multi-channel solutions and select. With mutex the change will be a straightforward replace of a queue by a priority queue and an extra if inside the mutex.