blinkcast

Fast, Bounded, Lossy Rust broadcast channel with support for no_std targets.

Sometimes it may spin the CPU for a bit if there is a contention on a single element in the buffer for write and read operations. Could happen more often for small buffers.

This is implemented with ring buffer and atomic operations, it may be considered lock-free, as we don't use Lock premitive, but the implementation may spin waiting for a contending writer/reader to finish accessing a specific node. Its very rare, but maybe I won't call it lock-free in the strict sense.

The API of the blinkcast is similar to that of the std::sync::mpsc channels. However, there are some differences:

• It allows for multiple consumers (receivers) and multiple producers (senders).
• The channel broadcasts every send to every consumer.
• Lossy, the sender will overwrite old data, so receivers must be quick or they will lose the old data (don' t blink).
• Implemented for no_std environments.

Due to that nature, this is useful in applications where data comes in very quick and new data is always more important than old data which can be discarded. This could be useful for example in implementing:

• audio driver (small glitch but staying up to date is better than delayed audio).
• mouse/keyboard driver with big enough buffer (This was actually why this was created, see: Amjad50/Emerald#71 and Amjad50/Emerald#72)
• etc...

See the documentation for examples.

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV)

The minimum supported Rust version for this crate is 1.61.0

License

Licensed under MIT (LICENSE or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)