Enforcing reference capability in FastFlow with rust

In this work, we investigate the performance impact of using the Rust programming language instead of the C++ one to implement two basic parallel patterns as provided by the FASTFLOW parallel library. The rationale of using Rust is that it is a modern system-level language capable to statically guarantee that if a data reference is sent over a communication channel, the ownership of the reference is transferred from the producer to the consumer. Such reference-passing semantics is at the base of the FASTFLOW programming model. However, the FASTFLOW library does not enforce nor checks its correct usage leaving this burden to the programmer. The results obtained comparing the FASTFLOW/C++, and the Rust implementations of the same implementation schema of the Task-Farm and Pipeline patterns show that Rust is a valid alternative to C++ for the FASTFLOW library with indubitable benefits in terms of programmability.