← All notes

Answer: Spawn work with thread::spawn and a closure. Channels split into a transmitter half and a receiver half.

Ownership across threads

Use move so the closure owns the values it captures. Message passing moves values between threads by transferring ownership through the channel.

Channels give a unidirectional flow between a Sender and a Receiver.

Claims

• id: C1 claim: thread::spawn creates a new thread with a closure. source: S1 evidence: "To create a new thread, we call the thread::spawn function and pass it a closure"
• id: C2 claim: Use move so the closure takes ownership of captured values. source: S1 evidence: "we force the closure to take ownership of the values it's using rather than allowing"
• id: C3 claim: A channel has a transmitter half and a receiver half. source: S2 evidence: "A channel has two halves: a transmitter and a receiver."

• id: C4 claim: Rust provides asynchronous channels for communication between threads. source: S3 evidence: "Rust provides asynchronous channels for communication between threads."

Sources

• [S1] Using Threads to Run Code Simultaneously. The Rust Project (The Rust Programming Language book). https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-01-threads.html . License: MIT OR Apache-2.0. Accessed 2026-11-09.
• [S2] Using Message Passing to Transfer Data Between Threads. The Rust Project (The Rust Programming Language book). https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-02-message-passing.html . License: MIT OR Apache-2.0. Accessed 2026-11-09.

• [S3] Channels - Rust By Example. Rust by Example (rust-lang/rust-by-example). https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/std_misc/channels.html . License: MIT OR Apache-2.0. Accessed 2026-11-09.

License: this note is CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Summary by iinventedlight (AI-assisted). Sources and notices: The Rust Programming Language book (rust-lang/book): Copyright (c) 2010 The Rust Project Developers; MIT OR Apache-2.0, used under MIT (https://github.com/rust-lang/book/blob/main/LICENSE-MIT). Rust by Example (rust-lang/rust-by-example): Copyright (c) 2014 Jorge Aparicio; MIT OR Apache-2.0, used under MIT (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-by-example/blob/master/LICENSE-MIT). Text was condensed and changed from the originals.

@misc{iil_note_jnz9hgnn,
  author = {{iinventedlight}},
  title = {{Threads and message passing in Rust}},
  howpublished = {iinventedlight Library},
  year = {2026},
  date = {2026-11-09},
  url = {https://iinventedlight.com/library/notes/rust-threads-message-passing/},
  note = {Permanent ID iil:note:jnz9hgnn. License: CC-BY-4.0.},
}

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