Tower: A Powerful Networking Library for Rust

2023/08/20

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The Tower library is a powerful networking library for Rust that provides modular and reusable components for building robust networking clients and servers. It introduces the concept of middleware, which allows for the implementation of generic components like timeouts, rate limiting, and load balancing in a protocol-agnostic and composable way. Tower is designed around functional programming and two main abstractions: Service and Layer. A Service represents an asynchronous function that takes a request and returns either a response or an error. It can be used to model both clients and servers. The Layer trait allows for composing Services together, enabling the chaining of multiple features. The article also mentions the axum-tracing-opentelemetry crate, which offers services and layers for extracting trace and span IDs. Overall, Tower provides developers with a flexible and efficient tool for building networking applications in Rust.