prodash

prodash allows to integrate progress reporting into concurrent applications and provides renderers for displaying it in various ways.

It's easy to integrate thanks to a pragmatic API, and comes with a terminal user interface by default.

How to use…

Be sure to read the documentation at https://docs.rs/prodash, it contains various examples on how to get started.

Or run the demo application like so cd prodash && cargo run --all-features --example dashboard.

Feature Toggles

This crate comes with various cargo features to tailor it to your needs.

• progress-tree (default)
  • Provide a Progress and Root trait implementation for use with the render-line and render-tui backed by dashmap.
  • progress-tree-hp-hashmap - high-performance registry for pregree tree nodes in case of ultra-heavy insertions and deletions.
    • If this is necessary, it's probably impossible to resonably visualize the progress tree anyway, but the option exists nonetheless in case it is ever needed. Historically, this was the default, but now it seems simpler is better and just fine for typical programs.
  • progress-tree-log (default)
    • If logging in the log crate is initialized, a log will be used to output all messages provided to tree::Item::message(…) and friends. No actual progress is written.
    • May interfere with render-tui or render-line, or any renderer outputting to the console.
• progress-log
  • A Progress implementation which logs messages and progress using the log crate
• local-time
  • If set, timestamps in the message pane of the render-tui will be using the local time, not UTC
  • If set, timestamps of the log messages of the render-line will be using the local time, not UTC
  • Has no effect without the render-tui or render-line respectively
• render-line
  • Provide a minimal line-based progress renderer which can be limited to a subset of the progress hierarchy.
  • It's like the render-tui, but with far less dependencies and less visual fidelity - all it needs is to move the cursor a little while drawing characters and block graphics.
  • Support for clicolors spec and no-color spec
  • Supports initial delay that won't affect log messages, showing progress only when needed, automatically.
  • Requires one of these additional feature flags to be set to be functional
    • one required (mutually exclusive)
      • render-line-crossterm - use the crossterm backend, useful for working on windows
      • render-line-termion - use the termion backend, useful for lean unix-only builds
  • Optional features
    • render-line-autoconfigure
      • If enabled, calls to render::line::Options::auto_configure() will configure the display based on whether or not we are in a terminal and set its color mode based on what's possible or desired.
    • signal-hook
      • If set, and the hide_cursor line renderer option is set, the cursor will be hidden and SIG_INT and SIG_TERM handlers will be installed to reset the cursor on exit. Otherwise you have to make sure to call shutdown_and_wait() on the JoinHandle returned to give the renderer a chance to undo the terminal changes. Failing to do so will leave the cusor hidden once the program has already finished.
      • Comes at the cost of an extra thread and additional dependencies.
• render-tui
  • Provide a terminal user interface visualizing every detail of the current progress state. It treats the terminal as a matrix display.
  • Requires one of these additional feature flags to be set to be functional ** (one required, mutually exclusive)
    • render-tui-crossterm
      • Use the crossterm crate as terminal backend
      • Works everywhere natively, but has more dependencies
      • You can set additional features like this cargo build --features render-tui-crossterm,crossterm/event-stream
    • render-tui-termion
      • Use the termion crate as terminal backend
      • It has less dependencies but works only on unix systems
      • to get this, disable default features and chose at least render-tui and render-tui-termion.
• unit-bytes
  • Supports dynamic byte display using the tiny bytesize crate.
• unit-human
  • Display counts in a way that is easier to grasp for humans, using the tiny human_format crate.
• unit-duration
  • Displays time in seconds like '5m4s' using the tiny humantime crate.

Features

• fast insertions and updates for transparent progress tracking of highly concurrent programs
• a messages buffer for information about success and failure
• a terminal user interface for visualization, with keyboard controls and dynamic re-sizing
• unicode and multi-width character support

Limitations

• the line renderer is inherently limited in the amount of progress it can display without visual artifacts.
• it does copy quite some state each time it displays progress information and messages
• The underlying sync data structure, dashmap, does not document every use of unsafe
  • I also evaluated evmap, which has 25% less uses of unsafe, but a more complex interface.
  • Thus far it seemed 'ok' to use, who knows… we are getting mutable pieces of a hashmap from multiple threads, however, we never hand out multiple handles to the same child which should make actual concurrent access to the same key impossible.
• If there are more than 2^16 tasks
  • then
    • running concurrently on a single level of the tree, they start overwriting each other
    • over its lifetime, even though they do not run concurrently, eventually new tasks will seem like old tasks (their ID wrapped around)
  • why
    • on drop, they never decrement a child count used to generate a new ID
  • fix
    • make the id bigger, like u32
    • we should do that once there is a performance test
• If the log lines are too long for the terminal width when using the line renderer
  • then
    • visual artifacts will appear
  • why
    • trying to draw beyond the terminal boundary will add a line break automatically, which can cause unexpected overdraw.
  • fix
    • count amount of blocks drawn, without ansi codes, and stop drawing at the boundary.

Lessons Learned

• drop() is not garantueed to be called when the future returns Ready and is in the futures::executor::ThreadPool
  • Workaround: drop and cleanup explicitly, prone to forgetting it.
  • This is also why futures::future::abortable() works (by stopping the polling), but doesn't as cleanup is not performed, even though it clearly would be preferred.
  • fix
    • Use a join handle and await it - this will drop the future properly
• select() might not work with complex futures - these should then be boxed() if Unpin isn't implemented.