I have been playing with tokio already in couple of small projects (ptunnel-rust and indirectly (via hyper) in audioserve), but I cannot say that I’m proficient.  Also tokio is very much moving target –  what I used couple month ago is already bit outdated now(old version is tokio_core crate – where default executor was on current thread, now it’s work stealing thread pool). So I decided to refresh and deepen my knowledge and created a toy project –  stupid jokes server –  it’s a TCP sever, which sends a random  joke to client after it connects and then closes connection. Jokes are stored in text file, separated by dashed lines.  My main interest was to test how to use local file system I/Os, which are blocking by nature, with tokio asynchronous approach (so I initially skipped easiest and probably most efficient implementation, where all jokes would be cached in memory).  Usually in a real project you’ll have some blocking code, so I need to know how to handle it. This article is history of my attempts (and failures) recorded in a hope that it might help others in learning tokio (and also writing it down helped me to absorb gained knowledge). Continue reading From Ignorance to Enlightenment – Playing with Tokio →