nats-aflowt

Experimental port of rust NATS client to rust async

Don't get blocked by asynk - stay aflowt

The nats::asynk module is an async veneer over blocking io and consumes a thread-per-connection, and, depending on how you use subscriptions, an additional thread per subscription handler. This package uses real async throughout the client. All connections and subscriptions are non-blocking and may safely share the same thread, or, optionally, a thread pool.

This package is not endorsed by the Nats team. I wrote it as an experiment after running into some limitations with ratsio, another nats async client.

:loudspeaker: Warning

:warning: This should only be used in environments where software is expected to hang, consume all CPU, destroy data, and explode at random intervals.

Status (Jan 8, 2022)

• Feature parity with rust nats client (including jetstream, tls, etc.) as of commit d22329c (main branch, jan 7, 2022)

• Tested on linux x86_64. All tests pass except for two: (jetstream:kv and jetstream:object_store), which are currently disabled by a feature flag.

• apis are subject to change

Changes from nats.rs

• can run all async tasks in a single thread (subscriptions and connections do not spawn new threads)

• in the port to async, many apis have changed:

  • most public functions have been changed to be async
  • all functions that used to return an Iterator now return futures::Stream
  • wherever there was an explicit iter(..) method to create an iterator, it's been replaced with stream(..).
  • jetstream PagedIterator replaced with Stream
  • error callbacks must now implement a trait, instead of being a simple closure. See doc comments and examples folder for examples.
  • added Subscription.with_async_handler to take async closure
    • (Subscription.with_handler still takes sync closure)

• jetstream kv and object_store functions are enabled in this crate in the default feature set to support testing. (In nats.rs they are behind an "unstable" feature flag and should be considered unstable here).

• some tests have been added

• upgraded to rust 2021 edition

This crate currently depends on the tokio runtime. I suspect if the Nats team does develop a pure async rust client, they will attempt to make it runtime agnostic.