Hello, I’m learning rust and cryptocurrency (by trying to replicate some of bitcoin on rust) with a colleague, and we came across tokio and some other macro crates, and after studying some of it, we are finding it very useful when thinking about the system.
We can treat a peer as an instance of a state machine, and this is supposed to be run async.
(I apologize for the boilerplate on the image and code.)
The Idea here is that every time a peer connects (telnet localhost 8080), it starts in the “welcome” state, then immediately transitions to the “standby”. If the peer sends “PING?”, it goes to the “waiting” state; then it may send “BYE” and have its connection closed, or say “A” and go into another state, called “ComposedState”, which is another machine state itself.
why an inner machine
When wondering how we would wire up the future’s notification flow, we concluded we couldn’t try using async::await!(), since it will create sub-states in it’s own way and probably will have to move the state’s internal information ownership into each inner-state, as it passes thru them.
We intend to use only a (protocol)message (decoded from socket) or an admin command (such as “kill all peers”) future that could wake up an outer state to get transitioned–by using futures::select. Therefore, since a peer state may need some “execution” that can be run async, this can’t happen inside a state transition logic, only on state borderlines (before starting a transition-- so the next state can poll-depend on the future started on the previous state).
Without await!() and not wanting to mix inner state logic with outer states, we tested and confirmed we can treat a machine future as a state (by the crates we are using).
So after the peer said “A”, it moved into the sub-machine, which starts at “innerA” state. Then if the peer says “B”, it moves into the “InnerB” state, otherwise it will go to the “InnerEnd” state (so the outer machine will actually evaluate this). From the “InnerB” state, whatever the player says will move him to the “InnerEnd” state, and whatever he said will be evaluated by the outer machine. This outer state will evaluate the said message: if it’s “PING”, it will reply PONG and move the peer back to “standby”, otherwise it will be moved back into “waiting” state.
