Ring: a lock-free "many writers, one ordered reader" queue in Rust

Rust Users Forum2026-10-15 08:410 views

Hi! I'd like feedback on ring, a family of Rust crates for a lock-free write path: many threads send work, and one thread processes it in a strict, reproducible order.

Repo: GitHub - Wandalen/ring: Ring Factory: a lock-free foundation for order-matching engines and other latency-critical, strictly-ordered systems · GitHub

The problem

With a shared lock, threads pile up waiting for each other ("lock convoy"), and latency jumps unpredictably under load.
Some systems need every message processed exactly once and in one fixed order, so the result is the same every time it's replayed.
General-purpose queues are fast, but they aren't built around that exact shape: many producers, one ordered consumer.

What ring does

No locks: producers claim a slot, write it and publish it, without waiting on a shared lock.
Exactly once, in order: every record is delivered once, in a reproducible total order.
Two shapes: single-producer (SPSC) for the lowest overhead, and multi-producer (MPSC) with batch claiming.
Control when full: you choose what happens when the ring is full (overflow policies), and the producer never overtakes the slowest reader.
Extras: thread-local staging, wait strategies (spin, yield, park), and clean shutdown with drain.
Checked: unsafe is denied across the workspace except in a few justified places; concurrency is tested with loom and fuzzing in CI.

let mut ring = Factory.build::< u32 >( RingConfig::new( 8 )? )?; let ( mut producer, mut consumer ) = ring.ends().split(); producer.try_push( 7 )?; assert_eq!( consumer.drain().next(), Some( 7 ) );

Results, honestly

Benchmarked against 11 alternatives (rtrb, ringbuf, crossbeam, flume, ArrayQueue and others) on one machine:

Single producer: up to +83% throughput over the fastest alternative (rtrb); a tie on single-record latency (3.5 ns).
Many producers, batched: leads its class.
Many producers, one record at a time: 2–4× slower than ArrayQueue and crossbeam-channel. This is the weak spot.