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OCaml Lwt Interop

WARNING: Highly experimental code, do not use in production!

This project aims to solve the problem of interop between asynchronous OCaml (Lwt flavor) and asynchronous Rust.

An illustrative example

The following Rust asynchronous stub:

use futures_lite::future;

#[ocaml_lwt_interop::func]
pub fn my_async_func() -> () {
    future::yield_now().await;
}

Can be declared from OCaml side as follows:

external my_async_func : unit -> unit Lwt.t = "my_async_func"

The func macro and the rest of the library do the heavy lifting to wrap that async Rust function into Lwt promise on OCaml side.

Architecture

Domain Executor

The core part is the DomainExecutor: it is an instance of async_executor::Executor that runs within an OCaml domain and is being tick()ed exclusively by the OCaml domain. This ensures that access to OCaml domain state is properly synchronized - either it's being used by OCaml code, or OCaml code calls tick() of domain-specific executor instance, which then in turn will be eligible to call back into OCaml code of the same domain.

The instance of DomainExecutor is managed at OCaml side, currently as a global ref, as OCaml 5 support will get implemented, this would be a variable inside Domain-Local-Storage.

Domain-local executor allows us to run Rust tasks on the same thread that is currently Running OCaml, await other futures, spawn more tasks and so on.

Domain Executor State

Whenever tasks are polled by OCaml domain executor, we first enter domain executor context and Tokio runtime context, both are managed as thread local stacks. This ensures that any Tokio functions like tokio::spawn can safely be used inside tasks spawned on OCaml domain executor. Also functions like getting a reference to OCaml runtime (sentinel type from ocaml-rs used to synchronize access to OCaml GC) will only work when ran on OCaml domain executor. This is a runtime safety check, same as with tokio, if certain functions get called without the context being enetered, it fails at runtime.

Promise integration

The library comes with bi-directional promise integration. It can create OCaml Lwt promises from Rust and resolve/reject them, and it can wrap OCaml Lwt promises so that they are exposed to Rust as Rust futures. Nothing particularly complex in this part, just some registered named helper callbacks from OCaml to create Lwt promises, and connect Rust wrapper future to Lwt promise via additional Rust stubs, used to manipulate the Rust wrapper from OCaml.

Architecture overview diagram

With OCaml 4.x support so far, we only have Domain 0 part of the below diagram. With OCaml 5.x support - multiple domains will run their Domain-local executors. The only limitation is blocking OCaml code can only be run on Domain 0, which does not sound like a big limitation in practice. The library is designed to be somewhat future-proof to work with OCaml 5.x, but so far has not been adapted or tested in this scenario.

arch-diagram