How does it compare to boost.fiber (github.com/olk/boost-fiber)?
2013/4/18 Valentin Milea
Is there interest for a coroutine-based library to make asynchronous APIs easier to deal with?
Typically, for each task there is cruft: chaining callbacks, managing intermediate state and error codes (since exceptions don't fit this model). The code flow get inverted and becomes difficult to follow.
Recent versions of F# and C# solve this problem. They implement an await operator that effectively suspends the executing method until a task completes. The compiler takes care of transforming subsequent code into a continuation. Everything runs on the main thread, with asynchronous methods spending most time awaiting. N3328 proposes resumable functions of this kind in C++.
For an immediate solution we could leverage the Boost.Context/Coroutine library. The resulting code may look like this:
try { task = do_a_async(...)
// yield until task done task.await(); } catch (const some_exception& e) { // exceptions arrive in awaiting context }
// normal code flow for (auto& task : tasks1) { task.await(); }
taskAny = await_any(tasks2); taskAny.await();
...
There needs to be a representation for Awaitable tasks (similar to std::future but non-blocking). The other requirement is to have a Scheduler (run loop) in order to weave between coroutines.
Benefits: - normal code flow: plain conditionals, loops, exceptions, RAII - algorithm state tracked on coroutine stack - async tasks are composable - any async API can be wrapped
Cons: - must wrap async APIs (e.g. Boost.Asio) - needs std::exception_ptr to dispatch exceptions - stackful coroutines are sometimes difficult to debug
I wrote an open-source library that does this: https://github.com/vmilea/CppAwait.
It's far from Boost style but the concept looks sane. For a comparison between async patterns please see: https://github.com/vmilea/CppAwait/blob/master/Examples/ex_stockClient.cpp
Making a Boost version would involve serious redesign. So is this worth pursuing?
Thanks!
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