GPUI Async Websocket Chat

This is an example application to showcase how I was able to get async sockets working with GPUI.

The main rub comes down to leveraging channels.

Our Web socket is split into a read Stream and write Sink via the futures extension(s).

let (ws_stream, _) = connect_async("ws://127.0.0.1:3030/chat")
    .await
    .expect("Failed to connect");

let (write, read) = ws_stream.split();

We can then create two background threads, one takes a channel and the write Sink, the other a channel and the read Stream.

// Reading messages from a websocket on background thread
cx.background_executor()
    .spawn(handle_incoming(read, incoming_ch))
    .detach();

// Writing messages to a websocket on background thread
cx.background_executor()
    .spawn(handle_outgoing(write, outgoing_ch))
    .detach();

Roughly:

Control View --> Puts message on Channel --> loop reads from channel and puts on socket write Sink.

List View <-- Reads message from Channel <-- loop reads from socket read Stream and puts on channel.

We hand our outgoing_ch to a Controls view. This view has a submit method that takes the text input's content and places it in the channel.

Running the demo

Please run the websocket server first (separate terminal):

cargo run --bin server

You can then run the app. I recommend running multiple apps as the server is just a broadcaster, so:

cargo build
./target/debug/gpui-async

In again another terminal:

./target/debug/gpui-async