tarpc is now instrumented with tracing primitives extended with
OpenTelemetry traces. Using a compatible tracing-opentelemetry
subscriber like Jaeger, each RPC can be traced through the client,
server, amd other dependencies downstream of the server. Even for
applications not connected to a distributed tracing collector, the
instrumentation can also be ingested by regular loggers like env_logger.
# Breaking Changes
## Logging
Logged events are now structured using tracing. For applications using a
logger and not a tracing subscriber, these logs may look different or
contain information in a less consumable manner. The easiest solution is
to add a tracing subscriber that logs to stdout, such as
tracing_subscriber::fmt.
## Context
- Context no longer has parent_span, which was actually never needed,
because the context sent in an RPC is inherently the parent context.
For purposes of distributed tracing, the client side of the RPC has all
necessary information to link the span to its parent; the server side
need do nothing more than export the (trace ID, span ID) tuple.
- Context has a new field, SamplingDecision, which has two variants,
Sampled and Unsampled. This field can be used by downstream systems to
determine whether a trace needs to be exported. If the parent span is
sampled, the expectation is that all child spans be exported, as well;
to do otherwise could result in lossy traces being exported. Note that
if an Openetelemetry tracing subscriber is not installed, the fallback
context will still be used, but the Context's sampling decision will
always be inherited by the parent Context's sampling decision.
- Context::scope has been removed. Context propagation is now done via
tracing's task-local spans. Spans can be propagated across tasks via
Span::in_scope. When a service receives a request, it attaches an
Opentelemetry context to the local Span created before request handling,
and this context contains the request deadline. This span-local deadline
is retrieved by Context::current, but it cannot be modified so that
future Context::current calls contain a different deadline. However, the
deadline in the context passed into an RPC call will override it, so
users can retrieve the current context and then modify the deadline
field, as has been historically possible.
- Context propgation precedence changes: when an RPC is initiated, the
current Span's Opentelemetry context takes precedence over the trace
context passed into the RPC method. If there is no current Span, then
the trace context argument is used as it has been historically. Note
that Opentelemetry context propagation requires an Opentelemetry
tracing subscriber to be installed.
## Server
- The server::Channel trait now has an additional required associated
type and method which returns the underlying transport. This makes it
more ergonomic for users to retrieve transport-specific information,
like IP Address. BaseChannel implements Channel::transport by returning
the underlying transport, and channel decorators like Throttler just
delegate to the Channel::transport method of the wrapped channel.
# References
[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing
[2] https://opentelemetry.io
[3] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust/tree/main/opentelemetry-jaeger
[4] https://github.com/env-logger-rs/env_logger
The tarpc::server proc-macro can be used to annotate implementations of
services to turn async functions into the proper declarations needed
for tarpc to be able to call them.
This uses the assert_type_eq crate to check that the transformations
applied by the tarpc::server proc macro are correct and lead to code
that compiles.
* syn updated to latest version
* quote updated to latest version
* proc-macro-2 updated to latest version
* Performance improvements
* Don't create unnecessary TokenStreams for output types
As part of this, I made an optional tokio feature which, when enabled,
adds utility functions that spawn on the default tokio executor. This
allows for the removal of the runtime crate.
On the one hand, this makes the spawning utils slightly less generic. On
the other hand:
- The fns are just helpers and are easily rewritten by the user.
- Tokio is the clear dominant futures executor, so most people will just
use these versions.
# New Crates
- crate rpc contains the core client/server request-response framework, as well as a transport trait.
- crate bincode-transport implements a transport that works almost exactly as tarpc works today (not to say it's wire-compatible).
- crate trace has some foundational types for tracing. This isn't really fleshed out yet, but it's useful for in-process log tracing, at least.
All crates are now at the top level. e.g. tarpc-plugins is now tarpc/plugins rather than tarpc/src/plugins. tarpc itself is now a *very* small code surface, as most functionality has been moved into the other more granular crates.
# New Features
- deadlines: all requests specify a deadline, and a server will stop processing a response when past its deadline.
- client cancellation propagation: when a client drops a request, the client sends a message to the server informing it to cancel its response. This means cancellations can propagate across multiple server hops.
- trace context stuff as mentioned above
- more server configuration for total connection limits, per-connection request limits, etc.
# Removals
- no more shutdown handle. I left it out for now because of time and not being sure what the right solution is.
- all async now, no blocking stub or server interface. This helps with maintainability, and async/await makes async code much more usable. The service trait is thusly renamed Service, and the client is renamed Client.
- no built-in transport. Tarpc is now transport agnostic (see bincode-transport for transitioning existing uses).
- going along with the previous bullet, no preferred transport means no TLS support at this time. We could make a tls transport or make bincode-transport compatible with TLS.
- a lot of examples were removed because I couldn't keep up with maintaining all of them. Hopefully the ones I kept are still illustrative.
- no more plugins!
# Open Questions
1. Should client.send() return `Future<Response>` or `Future<Future<Response>>`? The former appears more ergonomic but it doesn’t allow concurrent requests with a single client handle. The latter is less ergonomic but yields back control of the client once it’s successfully sent out the request. Should we offer fns for both?
2. Should rpc service! Fns take &mut self or &self or self? The service needs to impl Clone anyway, technically we only need to clone it once per connection, and then leave it up to the user to decide if they want to clone it per RPC. In practice, everyone doing nontrivial stuff will need to clone it per RPC, I think.
3. Do the request/response structs look ok?
4. Is supporting server shutdown/lameduck important?
Fixes#178#155#124#104#83#38
