Practical Networked Applications in Rust

This project focuses on building a practical networked, multithreaded, and asynchronous Rust application. The end goal is to create a key-value database, offering opportunities to explore:

• The Rust crate ecosystem.
• Concurrent data structures.
• Async programming in Rust.
• Key language features.
• Essential Rust tools.

Project Overview

The project involves constructing a fully-functional, networked key-value store using best practices in Rust. Along the way, you will work with topics such as:

• Program structure and maintenance in Rust.
• Applying tools like clippy and rustfmt to ensure code quality.
• Handling errors effectively following Rust's best practices.
• Serialization with serde for efficient data storage and transfer.
• Implementing log-structured storage, inspired by bitcask.
• Network programming using tokio and the Rust standard library.
• Benchmarking using criterion for performance testing.
• Writing foolproof parallel code with the crossbeam crate.
• Exploring asynchronous programming with Rust futures.
• Learning how to find the right documentation and crates to solve problems in Rust.

Key Features

• Concurrency: Efficiently handle multiple client requests using multithreading and async Rust.
• Storage: Build a simple log-structured storage engine inspired by modern key-value stores.
• Networking: Implement robust network communication with async Rust and tokio.
• Error Handling: Leverage Rust’s rich error-handling ecosystem to write reliable, maintainable code.

Technologies and Tools

The project will use the following technologies and tools:

• Rust: The main language of the project, chosen for its performance and safety guarantees.
• tokio: A runtime for writing reliable, fast, and secure network applications.
• serde: A framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures.
• clippy: A Rust linter to ensure code quality.
• rustfmt: A code formatting tool for maintaining consistency.
• criterion: A benchmarking library to test and optimize the performance of the system.
• crossbeam: A crate for parallel programming in Rust.

Goals

This project aims to:

1. Build a fully-functional key-value store that can handle multiple clients concurrently.
2. Explore the best practices for writing high-performance, reliable Rust applications.
3. Implement asynchronous network programming and multithreading.
4. Gain hands-on experience with serialization, error handling, and performance benchmarking.