Recently I’ve been working in static analysis land and as a part of that have been familiarizing myself with data flow analysis. I look at a fair amount of MIR and so decided to delve into the rustc_mir_dataflow crate to see how these things are handled in the rust compiler. There is a helpful introduction to this topic in the rustc dev guide, and this post fleshes things out a bit.

It would be such a shame if I couldn’t combine Rust, recursion schemes, and graphs into one blog post (with the added bonus of leaving out C++). So here we go!

I was recently looking into implementing some speculative execution functionality using std::async; based on some seed data, the goal was to asynchronously run a compute-intensive calculation where the result may or may not be needed at a later time. When new seed data became available, it was an indication that any in-progress computation should be terminated early and that its result be considered defunct.