Remove Tokio requirement

[stevefan1999-personal]

I wanted to get rid of tokio so we can run this with our own runtime of choice (async-std, smol, whatever). This works by removing tokio mpsc but instead use https://github.com/zesterer/flume or https://github.com/smol-rs/async-channel that are executor agonistic, and some oneshot is also replaced by futures.

Unit tests are passing, but I doubt this won't be enough to be accepted by the team at this rough stage. I rather want to sort these few following questions first before we officially submit this draft:

1. We have mixed in flume and async_channel and those will increase binary size for a little (synthetic example shows it will grow by 15%). Some people especially for those who wanted to make special program that embeds into the system requires a small binary size and this may not be acceptable. For my example, this is a special embedded system that runs on only 2MB of SPI flashes but can run on std out of curious. So, can we unify into one channel crate?
2. What about DelayQueue? This is more of a Tokio exclusive feature because the timing is handled by the global reactor system. We wanted to detach from Tokio as much as possible, but right now this is a hard requirement for the deadline feature to compile and pass the test.
3. Is stream().fuse().poll_next_unpin really the equivalent of poll_recv in Tokio? This is a rather tricky question as far as I read, they are functionally near equivalent except poll_recv is way more efficient for some reason...
4. We also need to finish some examples that uses other runtime first before submitting the draft

One of the main selling points for this is that we can run tarpc in ESP32 thanks to https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-idf-sys, which itself hoisted a semi-std target but it should be implemented enough to run tarpc without Tokio afterwards. That said I hope this could be more of a long-term goal of decoupling from Tokio, so we still have a looooong way to go.

Regarding the reason I have to use both async-channel and flume: Some unit test failed with either async-channel and futures mpsc channel, in particular for the channels_per_key crate. I have no idea yet on why this is happening, but it seems like this is the only place I needed to use flume. It can be related to point 3, since I do have changed some unit tests instructions over there

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[tikue]

Hey! Thanks so much for working on this contribution. I'd be happy to explore options for removing tokio and getting tarpc running on ESP32. Given upcoming holidays, it may be some time before I can dive into this.

Is tokio's channel really not executor agnostic? That's somewhat surprising to me. And if so, is it intentional or a bug in the tokio channel?

Yeah, the timer related functionally does seem to be a sticking point. I think someone looked at removing tokio a few years ago and that was the hardest part to replace.

[stevefan1999-personal]

@tikue the problem is in the dependencies. If you pulled in tokio you pull in a lot of other irrelevant stuff that hinders compiling. Also, most Tokio packages are bound to use the reactor which the ESP32 clearly doesn't have, I won't be surprised that their channel implementation is bound to use the reactor as well.

[axos88]

Hmmm. It seems to me that delayqueue could be replaced by a bunch of ::spawn async { sleep(duration).await; do_thing.await }. Rescheduling is a bit tricky, but I'd say not impossible. We are using a LUT keyed by the request is anyway, the values could be the task handles returned by spawn to enable cancellation, and rescheduling is basically a cancellation and a scheduling with the new timeout. Although I'm not sure if rescheduling is really needed in terms of tarpc. Not as nice as having them in a stream, but it should work. Or it could also be implemented for smol is guess.

Not sure about performance of this though.

[stevefan1999-personal]

@axos88 flume itself even has a send_deadline function, but the problem is there is some issue regarding its semantics, and in some place for some reason I can't use flume, it just doesn't pass the unit test

[multivac61]

Is this being developed? Would be amazing to use this in embedded applications, e.g., in embassy-rs.

[stevefan1999-personal]

Is this being developed? Would be amazing to use this in embedded applications, e.g., in embassy-rs.

The biggest problem is that the deadline resolver currently has a hard reliance on Tokio, and it looks like we need to have a proactor based async runtime instead to have the deadline notification (otherwise you have to busy-wait/poll), so it is not really a generic solution and also being a tough challenge. I do have tested tarpc with esp32 and the tokio hack, and it worked amazing

[multivac61]

Is this being developed? Would be amazing to use this in embedded applications, e.g., in embassy-rs.

The biggest problem is that the deadline resolver currently has a hard reliance on Tokio, and it looks like we need to have a proactor based async runtime instead to have the deadline notification (otherwise you have to busy-wait/poll), so it is not really a generic solution and also being a tough challenge. I do have tested tarpc with esp32 and the tokio hack, and it worked amazing

Amazing! Would love to try that. I stumbled upon a new-ish rpc layer postcard-rpc especially made for MCUs and no_std runtimes, trying that out too.

[tikue]

@stevefan1999-personal closing this for now as it's stalled out for a while. BTW, it looks like some people have gotten tokio working on esp32, I'd be interested in your thoughts on that (but maybe we can continue on an issue) https://github.com/jasta/esp32-tokio-demo

[stevefan1999-personal]

@tikue No I'm not giving this up. The point is that I want to make tarpc runtime-agnostic, to a point it is not confined by tokio and user can choose whatever async runtime they want. This can be smol, or this can even be embassy. But I do agree this is kinda big and needs to break down into smaller parts. Let me get this real quick