Proxy server in Rust (part 2)

Let’s listen over TCP

This is how a draft of the main source file looks like (explanations below):

// main.rs

use std::net;

const PROXY_PORT: u16 = 4000;

fn main() {
    let listener = net::TcpListener::bind(("127.0.0.1", PROXY_PORT)).unwrap();

    match listener.accept() {
        Ok((sock, _)) => handle_connection(sock),
        Err(e) => panic!("Error while accepting connection: {}", e),
    }
}

fn handle_connection(tcp: net::TcpStream) {
    println!("Opened connection: {:?}", tcp)
}

Listening

We’re going to use the std::net crate (you can think of crates as libraries):

use std::net;

std::net::TcpListener::bind function is used here to start listening on port 4000 of the localhost.

const PROXY_PORT: u16 = 4000;
let listener = net::TcpListener::bind(("127.0.0.1", PROXY_PORT)).unwrap();

u16 corresponds to uint16 known from other languages, so const PROXY_PORT: u16 = 4000; is a definition of a PROXY_PORT constant 16-bit integer equal to 4000.

What about the mysterious unwrap() at the end? Rust is a language designed with safety with minimal runtime overhead in mind. How is this achieved in this case? bind() could’ve simply returned TcpListener, but instead it returns std::io::Result<TcpListener>.

What’s the difference?

Something may go wrong while trying to bind the socket (i.e. the port can be already in use). This can be handled in many different ways (all with different trade-offs):

Throwing an exception does not make the programmer handle it. Returning a pointer or a bool value does not help here either. std::optional can be simply ignored using *. Rust tries to follow a different path. Instead of the abovementioned solutions, an object is returned in a wrapping (Result). This type can be one of the two: the expected value of type TcpListener or an error (Error)!

Since binding a socket to a port is vital for this program to run, the only thing I do here is unwrap() the result.

What does this method do? If there is no error - the value is returned. If an error happened, panic! is called (similar to panic known from Go).

Accepting a connection

match listener.accept() {
    Ok((sock, _)) => handle_connection(sock),
    Err(e) => panic!("Error while accepting connection: {}", e),
}

If everything went smoothly, call handle_connection(sock) which will care take of the rest.

If not, panic! with an appropriate error message.

Pattern matching (match)

match is a language construct used mostly in functional languages (like OCaml, Haskell, Lisp) rather than imperative ones (C, Python, Java, C++) and that’s why I’d like to say a few words about it.

Pattern matching is used for:

For example, if we were to write a simple calculator based on trees of arithmetic expressions, a part of code might have looked like this:

match expression {
    Add(x, y) => x + y,
    Sub(x, y) => x - y,
    Mul(x, y) => x * y,
    Div(x, y) => x / y,
}

This language construct is possible thanks to types that are an disjunction of different possible values. In this case it means that the expression can be i.e. an addition or substraction. The information about the kind of expression is stored and retrieved at runtime. What’s important is the fact that the compiler can check whether we’ve covered all the possible kinds (and warn us if we forget about one).

We could’ve simulated it in C++ in a following way:

enum Type { Add, Sub, Mul, Div };

struct Expression {
    Type type;
    union {
        Add add;
        Sub sub;
        Mul mul;
        Div div;
    } expr;
};

switch expr.type {
    case Type::Add: return expr.add.x + expr.add.y; break;
    case Type::Sub: return expr.add.x - expr.add.y; break;
    case Type::Mul: return expr.add.x * expr.add.y; break;
    case Type::Div: return expr.add.x / expr.add.y; break;
}

As you can see, pattern matching is pretty convenient. In the languages that support it natively, the implementation is better than what I have shown here in C++. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Rust to talk about its internals in this case.

panic!

panic! is a macro (right now we can think of it as a function, but ! in Rust is an indicator of a macro call) used for critical program errors.

panic! receives an argument list similar to printf known from other programming languages, and {} is used to print the values of any type (not exactly, more on that later).

What’s coming up?

In the next posts I plan to talk about: