[swift-evolution] [Concurrency] Async/Await

[David Hart]

Hello,

Thanks for the great work on the async/await proposal! After reading it, I have a few questions and comments about it, so I’m creating this thread to concentrate on that topic (instead of Actors).

Generators

The proposal mentions in Problem 6 of the Motivation how generators can help write sequences:

In contrast, languages that have generators allow you to write something more close to this:

func getSequence() -> AnySequence<Int> {
    let seq = sequence {
        for i in 1...10 {
            yield(i*i)
        }
    }
    return AnySequence(seq)
}

This feels very similar to me from C# where the yield keyword is used to support the generator feature. But I fail to see how the coroutines as described in this proposal resolve this problem. Can someone explain?

beginAsync

The documentation of the beginAsync and suspendAsync functions state:

// NB: Names subject to bikeshedding. These are low-level primitives that most
// users should not need to interact with directly, so namespacing them
// and/or giving them verbose names unlikely to collide or pollute code
// completion (and possibly not even exposing them outside the stdlib to begin
// with) would be a good idea.

But I don’t understand how they can be kept private to the standard library when they are used for the important pattern of spawning off an async operation from a non-async function:

Despite these problems, it is essential that the model encompasses this pattern, because it is a practical necessity in Cocoa development. With this proposal, it would look like this:

@IBAction func buttonDidClick(sender:AnyObject) {
  // 1
  beginAsync {
    // 2
    let image = await processImage()
    imageView.image = image
  }
  // 3
Futures

When discussing futures, the proposal states:

The exact design for a future type deserves its own proposal, but a proof of concept could look like this:

Does that sentence imply that the Core Team would welcome a Future implementation into the Standard Library?

async as a subtype of throws instead of orthogonal to it

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the proposal came out and I see a few serious disadvantages at making async a subtype of throws which might benefit from being discussed or/and mentioned in the proposal.

1. We loose the automatic documentation try provides for signaling failable functions:

let image = await downloadImage()
let processedImage = await processImage(image)
await present(MyViewController(image: image))

In my example, downloadImage can fail because of network conditions, processImage can not fail, and present is the UIKit function which presents view controllers and it can’t fail either. But that’s not obvious from reading the code. We’ve lost information.

2. Supporting try? and try! adds a lot of confusion:

As was mentioned by Karim Nassar is another post, if await infers try, then there seems to be no good solution for supporting try? and try!:

Using await? and await! seems slightly conter-intuitive because we are further mixing the concepts of coroutines/asynchronous operations with error handling.
Adding try? and try! (like suggested Chris Lattner) feels like it makes point (1) by having both explicit try?/! and implicit try through await.

3. Philosophical discussion

If async calls don’t return futures because coroutines are a generally useful language features beyond the domain of async/await, doesn’t making async imply throws also muddy the concept of coroutines where failable coroutine operations don’t make much sense?

David.
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