NAME

Future::AsyncAwait - deferred subroutine syntax for futures

SYNOPSIS

use Future::AsyncAwait;

async sub do_a_thing
{
   my $first = await do_first_thing();

   my $second = await do_second_thing();

   return combine_things( $first, $second );
}

do_a_thing()->get;

This module provides syntax for deferring and resuming subroutines while waiting for Futures to complete.

WARNING: The actual semantics in this module are in a very early state of implementation. A few things work but most do not. Don't expect to be able to use this module in any real code yet.

That said, the syntax parsing and semantics for immediate futures are already defined and working. So it is already very slightly useful for writing simple functions that return immediate futures.

Instead of writing

sub foo
{
   ...
   return Future->done( @result );
}

you can now simply write

async sub foo
{
   ...
   return @result;
}

with the added side-benefit that any exceptions thrown by the elided code will be turned into an immediate-failed Future rather than making the call itself propagate the exception, which is usually what you wanted when dealing with futures.

In addition, code such as the following simple case may work even on non-immediate futures:

async sub bar
{
   my ( $f ) = @_;

   return 1 + await( $f ) + 3;
}

For a more complete list of what is still unimplemented, see "TODO".

TODO

• Suspend and resume over other interesting types of context, such as BLOCK and various LOOPs:

  async sub with_loop
  {
     while(1) {
        my $result = await func();
        return if $result;
     }
  }

• Suspend and resume with some consideration for the savestack; i.e. the area used to implement local and similar:

  our $VAR;
  
  async sub with_local
  {
     local $VAR = "preserved";
  
     await $F;
  
     print "I still have VAR: $VAR\n";
  }

• Clean up the implementation; check for and fix memory leaks.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Zefram, ilmari and others from irc.perl.org/#p5p for assisting with trickier bits of XS logic. Thanks to genio for project management and actually reminding me to write some code.

AUTHOR

Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk>