Crossfire: High-performance lockless spsc/mpsc/mpmc channels for Rust

Crossfire just dropped a turbo-charged update for Rust message channels—the pipes apps use to pass data around—and the community instantly turned into two camps: the speed freaks and the safety squad. The project boasts lock-free channels (no waiting in line) and claims “faster than ever” performance after ditching a dependency and tuning its internals. It even warns it’s now so fast it can stress some async runtimes, with ARM users urged to upgrade Tokio.

Commenters dove right into the chaos. One helpful soul translated the acronym soup—SPSC means one sender/one receiver, MPMC means many-to-many—because yes, we were all pretending to know. Another reader raised the red flag of the week: cancellation safety. They cited the project’s wiki note about a rival channel’s optimization that “makes the async API not cancellation-safe,” wondering if it’s tied to the infamous “future lock” debate. Cue panic emojis and “is fast worth it if it’s flaky?” energy.

Meanwhile, the performance bragging—“no one has gone before”—sparked memes about Crossfire being “so fast your runtime needs a nap.” People cheered the VPS boost trick and the easy benches (hello, cargo bench), but the room stayed divided: speed chasers yelling “bench or it didn’t happen,” safety folks asking “but does it unwind gracefully?” Classic Rust drama, highly caffeinated.