Channels

Channels are a backend-agnostic way of communicating with peers. You can think of it as a wrapper around a stream (tcp, websockets or any other backend) that allows you to send and receive objects or messages.

For example, let's assume you have connected Alice's machine and Bob's machine.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
use canary::Channel;
use canary::Result; // result is equivalent to std::io::Result, but it implements `Serialize` / `Deserialize`

// runs on Alice's machine
async fn alice(mut chan: Channel) -> Result<()> {
    chan.send("Hey Bob!").await?;
    Ok(())
}

// runs on Bob's machine
async fn bob(mut chan: Channel) -> Result<()> {
    let message: String = chan.receive().await?;
    println!("alice says: `{}`", message); // alice says: `Hey Bob!`
    Ok(())
}
}

You can send objects that implement Serialize and receive objects that implement Deserialize.

Channels by default use Bincode for serialization, but they support various other formats such as JSON, BSON and Postcard.