I am frankly disappointed with C++0x futures. They lack a major feature–composability. It’s like having Booleans without OR or AND.

But let me first explain what futures are and how they’re implemented in C++0x.

What is a future?

In a nutshell, a future is an asynchronous function call. You call a function, but don’t wait until it completes–the body of the function executes in a separate thread. Instead you get a future, a promise to deliver the result at some later point in time. Only when your program desperately needs that value, do you synchronize on the future. If the calculation hasn’t been completed by then, you block until it has. Otherwise you get the result of the calculation.

C++0x futures

C++ splits the implementation of futures into a set of small blocks–it almost creates an assembly language of futures. Here are the primitives.

-promise

A promise is a vehicle for passing the return value (or an exception) from the thread executing a function to the thread that cashes in on the function future. The function (or a callable object) that is executed in a separate thread must have access to the promise , and it explicitly sets the return value.

You can think of a promise as a primitive channel; the function in this case is the sender. The equivalent of the “send” method is called promise::set_value (to pass an exception to the caller, the callee can call promise::set_exception .

There is no corresponding “receive” method–the receiving is abstracted into the future object.

Here’s some code that illustrates the use of promise . Notice how the function to be called asynchronously must be aware of the promise .

void asyncFun(promise<int> intPromise) { int result; try { // calculate the result intPromise.set_value(result); } catch (MyException e) { intPromise.set_exception(std::copy_exception(e)); } }

The calling thread creates the promise and passes it to the worker thread executing asyncFun (I’ll show the details later).

-future

A future is the synchronization object constructed around the receiving end of the promise channel. The calling thread obtains a future using promise::get_future .

The most important method of the future is get . If the result is not ready, get will block. When get completes, it either returns a value or throws an exception. The return value or the exception has been set by the called function through the promise associated with the future (see above).

get can also be split into its more basic parts: wait , optionally followed by has_value (or has_exception ) and the call to get , which is guaranteed not to block. The advantage of the latter approach is that one can use versions of wait , wait_for and wait_until , that set timeouts.

There is also an asynchronous method, is_ready , that can be used for polling rather than blocking.

There are two separate implementations of future : regular future (which used to be called unique_future in Draft Standard) that works like a unique_ptr as far as passing values goes, and shared_future that works more like shared_ptr . For instance, the method get of future cannot be called twice because it transfers the ownership of the result.

Here’s an example how a future could be used in the caller’s code:

promise<int> intPromise; future<int> intFuture = intPromise.get_future(); std::thread t(asyncFun, std::move(intPromise)); // do some other stuff int result = intFuture.get(); // may throw MyException

-packaged_task

In most cases the use of promises can be hidden from the programmer. There is a template class, packaged_task that takes any function (or callable object) and instruments it for use with futures. In essence, it creates a promise and calls the function from inside a try/catch block. If the function returns, packaged_task puts the value in the promise , otherwise it sets the exception. A packaged_task is a callable object (has the function call operator() defined) can be passed directly to a thread.

Here’s a more complete example:

vector<int> primesUpTo(int n); int main() { packaged_task<vector<int>(int)> task(&primesUpTo); future<vector<int>> fut = task.get_future(); thread t(move(task), 100); t.detach(); // do some other work while the primes are computing vector<int> primes = fut.get(); // print primes return 0; }

Composability

So far so good. The creation of futures might be a bit verbose in C++, but it can be easily adapted to concrete environments. The futures standard library should be treated as a set of primitive building blocks from which to build higher abstractions.

Notice how C++ separated the channel (promise) from the synchronization mechanism (future); and thread creation from communication and synchronization. You may, for instance, use futures with thread pools or create threads on the spot.

What was omitted from the standard, however, was the ability to compose futures. Suppose you start several threads to perform calculations or retrieve data in parallel. You want to communicate with those threads using futures. And here’s the problem: you may block on any individual future but not on all of them. While you are blocked on one, other futures might become ready. Instead of spending your precious time servicing those other futures, you might be blocked on the most time-consuming one. The only option to process futures in order of completion is by polling (calling is_ready on consecutive futures in a loop) and burning the processor.

The need for composability of synchronization events has been widely recognized. Windows has WaitForMultipleObjects , Unix has select , and several higher order languages have explicit constructs that serve the same purpose. But that’s a topic for my next installment.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Anthony Williams for helpful comments. Among other things, he is the author of one of the futures proposals for Boost. A stripped down version of it will become part of the threadpool library. Unfortunately, the stripping got rid of composability features.