HN user

fvncc

37 karma
Posts0
Comments17
View on HN
No posts found.

Actually another reason people use the architecture is for process level isolation, i.e. limiting the blast radius of memory corruption. But in both cases, Im sure you could design an ergonomic RPC framework that takes care of offloading computation mostly transparently behind the scenes :)

You can also check https://github.com/sequenceplanner/r2r for another example of ROS2 bindings (using in production at work for a couple of ROS nodes).

But TBH, in a Rust world, it’s worth revisiting the assumptions behind the ROS node architecture, since Rust is so strong at scaling to large monolithic applications (due to the strict hierarchical code patterns it encourages).

A transitional Rust approach, that doesn't try to reimplement everything from scratch, could do something like a strangler pattern: Take each ROS node, run them separately in “jails” with a Rust API around each one, then implement the plumbing/management logic in pure Rust.

Well each time you use the await keyword you are saying its a safe point to exit, which is more predictable than killing at random points. Holding locks across await points is an anti-pattern, and Rust at least can give a hint if you try to do that. Async/await implementations will also generally allow you to run cleanup code on cancellation (but the exact mechanism depends on the language).

In the end, its about expressing a state machine in a more concise implicit way, which is a suitable level of abstraction for most use cases.

One advantage of async/await is that its easier to cancel things. For example, this leads to the design pattern where you have multiple futures and you want to select the one that finishes first and cancel the rest.

In regular threaded programming, cancellation is a bit more painful as you need to have some type of cancellation token used each time the thread waits for something. This a) is more verbose and b) can lead to bugs where you forget to implement the cancellation logic.