Welcome

My name is Alice Ryhl. I am a Software Engineer at Google and a member of the core maintainer team for Tokio. At Google, I work on the Android Security and Privacy team, where I am currently working on Rust for Linux.

Projects and articles

I have written a few articles, most of which are about a project of mine. Note that some of these are quite old.

Actors with Tokio

2021-02-13

This article is about building actors with Tokio directly, without using any actor libraries such as Actix. This turns out to be rather easy to do, however there are some details you should be aware of:

Where to put the tokio::spawn call.
Struct with run method vs bare function.
Handles to the actor.
Backpressure and bounded channels.
Graceful shutdown.

The techniques outlined in this article should work with any executor, but for simplicity we will only talk about Tokio. There is some overlap with the spawning and channel chapters from the Tokio tutorial, and I recommend also reading those chapters.

Async: What is blocking?

2020-12-21

The async/await feature in Rust is implemented using a mechanism known as cooperative scheduling, and this has some important consequences for people who write asynchronous Rust code.

The intended audience of this blog post is new users of async Rust. I will be using the Tokio runtime for the examples, but the points raised here apply to any asynchronous runtime.

If you remember only one thing from this article, this should be it:

Async code should never spend a long time without reaching an .await.

Temporarily opt-in to shared mutation

2020-08-15

The purpose of this blog post is to celebrate the anniversary of two really neat methods on the Cell type:

Cell::from_mut This method turns a &mut T into a &Cell<T>.
Cell::as_slice_of_cells This method turns a &Cell<[T]> into a &[Cell<T>].

Both methods were released in version 1.37.0 of Rust, exactly one year ago from the date this post was published.

Backblaze B2 Rust library

2017-06-27

This page functions as a home page for my rust library backblaze-b2. Here are some links to the project:

The Game of Life on a PCB

2016-12-18

I've created a printed circuit board (PCB) that simulates the game of life on a 5 by 5 LED grid, and can be remote controlled with Bluetooth. The project was created in collaboration with another student as a school project. Here is a video of the finished product:

Fractals on the Riemann Sphere

2016-12-06

In order to investigate the behaviour of Newton Fractals at infinity, I've plotted Newton Fractals on the Riemann sphere. Here's an animated video of a Newton Fractal plotted on the Riemann sphere using YouTube's 360° video feature:

Introduction to Newton Fractals

2016-10-30

When I try to learn a new programming language, I don't write a hello world. Instead, I write a generator of newton fractals. Here's an example of a newton fractal: