Document Number: P0171R0 Date: 2015-11-06 Audience: Evolution Revises: none Reply to: Gor Nishanov (gorn@microsoft.com)

Response To: Resumable Expressions P0114R0

This paper is in response to concerns expressed in the resumable expressions paper P0114. We include brief quotes as a quick reminder of the concerns being discussed. Readers are encouraged to refer to P0114 for full context. Familiarity with P0054, P0055, P0057 and N4402 is highly desired.

When scheduling logic embedded in the language

(Section 1.1) ... design choices in N4402 ... introduce the potential for unfairness and starvation. (Section 4.5) This design, where await prefers to avoid coroutine suspension if it can, is a bad default. It leads to unfairness, jitter, and starvation.

We completely agree with P0114 that

scheduling logic should not be embedded in the language

favoring synchronous completion leads to unfairness, jitter, and starvation.

Luckily P0057 does none of those things. P0057 offers pure syntactic sugar and the responsibility for making such decisions is left to the library writer. In this particular case, it is not a job of a compiler to second guess a library-provided awaitable that says that suspend is not required.

In this concrete case, the responsibility lies with the implementor of

future<Message> receive_message(Connection& c);

In a case of a synchronous completion, a good async I/O library writer would have returned a future that is not ready and provided the result in .get() or to .then . In fact, to even make such a future as described in P0114, the library writer had to do the work to avoid safe defaults selected by the operating system.

For example, on Windows, even for synchronous API completions, notifications are always sent to a completion queue to be processed in the same way as any asynchronous completion. To suppress this behavior, a library writer would have to write the following:

// ascertain that a particular socket provider has support for sync completions: WSAPROTOCOL_INFOW wsaProtocolInfo; int wsaProtocolInfoSize = sizeof(wsaProtocolInfo); iResult = getsockopt( s.native_handle(), SOL_SOCKET, SO_PROTOCOL_INFOW, reinterpret_cast<char*>(&wsaProtocolInfo), &wsaProtocolInfoSize); panic_if(iResult == SOCKET_ERROR, "SOL_SOCKET"); syncCompletionPossible = (wsaProtocolInfo.dwServiceFlags1 & XP1_IFS_HANDLES) != 0; if (syncCompletionPossible) SetFileCompletionNotificationModes(s.native_handle(), FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS);

Even in those cases where library writer have chosen suboptimal behavior for awaitables returned from their asynchronous APIs, such as receive_message above, P0054 offers await_transform customization point which allows coroutine author to overwride defaults provided by the library writer.

We must remember to annotate the call with an await keyword

(Section 4.1): ... whenever we make a call to a resumable function we must remember to annotate the call with an await keyword. Failure to do so can result in hard to diagnose bugs ...

We completely agree that as the C++ language stands today, it is too easy to forget to handle the result of the function / constructor. We can see those mistakes made with terrifying frequency. It is so bad that some companies resorted to using macros, such as ACQUIRE_LOCK(m) as to avoid making the mistake of these kind:

lock_guard<mutex> (m); // oops, lock is acquired and released before ';' instead of lock_guard<mutex> _(m); // aha, now it will work as we wanted

Similarly, one of the famous misuses of std::async results in the following code executing a, b, c and d sequentially.

a(); std::async([]{b();}); std::async([]{c();}); d();

We were working on a proposal to address that, but, luckily, Andrew Tomazos beat us to it and offered NoDiscard paper addressing this concern. Annotating functions/classes with [[nodiscard]] attribute allows to catch mistakes at compile time as shown in the example below.

[[nodiscard]] future<int> Connection::Read(void* buf, size_t len); template <typename Mutex> [[nodiscard]] class lock_guard; future<void> f(Connection& c) { ... c.Read(buf, sizeof(buf)); // error: the return value of Read is discarded lock_guard<mutex> (m); // error: the return value of the constructor is discarded }

[If we had] direct access to the implementation type __foo, we could write an efficient ... batching_generator

All generator implementations shown in papers N4402 (and previous versions), P0057 (and previous versions) rely on direct access to the relevant parts of the coroutine data structures.

Let's take a look at N4402 "appendix A" that shows an example of a generator. We pasted here relevant snippets:

template <typename T> struct generator { struct promise_type { T const * CurrentValue; ... void yield_value(T const& value) { CurrentValue = addressof(value); } }; struct iterator : std::iterator<input_iterator_tag, T> { coroutine_handle<promise_type> coro; T const& operator*() const { return *coro.promise().CurrentValue; } ...

An object of a promise_type type resides inside of the coroutine internal state and direct access is provided by coroutine_handle::promise() .

In this example, when control flow reaches yield expr; , the coroutine is suspended, a pointer to an expression is stored in the coroutine promise and the consumer dereferences the iterator and gets direct access to the expression being yielded without any moves or copies.

It is trivial to write a batching_generator<T> , but in this case, a simple generator as shown in N4402 or P0057 will be more efficient. Because...

What compiler giveth compiler taketh away

(Section 3) ... we are not required to use a type-erased container (Section 4.3) Type erasure and fine grained polymorphism Every value produced by the generator requires an indirect function call. By embedding fine-grained type erasure into the language, we are denied the opportunity to develop library abstractions that amortise the cost of runtime polymorphism. (Section 4.4) Rather than minimising the abstraction penalty, a consequence of N4402 resumable functions’ type erasure is that they exhibit poor scalability

These indeed are grave concerns but they are inapplicable to P0057. As discussed in the Urbana, P0057 (and Urbana's N4134) allows a compiler to choose under which conditions type erasure needs to be performed and when it can be elided.

When a coroutine's lifetime is fully enclosed in the lifetime of its caller, no type erasure, indirect calls or memory allocations need to be done, which are exactly the cases when P0114 does not need type erasure. However, when you want to put a coroutine on an ABI boundary and/or use it for asynchronous scenarios, the compiler will do it for you which avoids the need to write boilerplate code. Moreover, in Urbana we discussed how this optimization can work even across ABI boundaries.

We are not aware of any circumstances where a solution written using the abstractions of P0114 will be more efficient than the same problem being solved using abstractions offered by P0057 and we have a case where abstractions of P0057 results in strictly better efficiency than P0114. For example, compare the negative overhead await adapters from N4287 with await library emulation shown in P0114.

A very costly maintenance nightmare

(Section 3) ... the maintenance burden of a viral await keyword (Section 4.1) Experiences with other languages that take a similar approach (such as Python) have shown that this quickly becomes a very costly maintenance nightmare.

We weren't able to obtain the source for the information for the claims above, so we had to resort to our own research.

Since C# was the first language that acquired this exact syntax in 2012, we contacted the C# design team and the C# program management teams to learn about their experience. They were not aware of any studies on that matter and commented that delight and joy is the usual reaction of people who use the await feature extensively.

Moreover, the await syntax proved extremely useful and popular and more languages adopted it to solve their asynchronous blues, HACK and Dart in 2014, Python (PEP0492) in May of 2015 and it seems to be on track to get into EcmaScript7 soon.

Since we are on the subject of maintenance nightmares, we would like to offer a conjecture that the absence of the await in P0114 is a likely source of many maintenance nightmares. Without a syntactic marker to signal to the person reading the code that something funny is going on, it is impossible to tell whether the following code is correct or not:

auto foo(string & s) { s.push_back('<'); do-stuff s.push_back('>'); }

How can we be sure that do-stuff will never result in suspension? Should we follow all of the possible call sequences to make sure that none of them lead to break resumable; ?

Note, that this code is fine to be used with fibers or threads, because in that case the entire stack is suspended, so the caller which owns s will be suspended as well, thus avoiding mismatched lifetimes.

In coroutines the suspend point is clearly marked with await , which tells the reader that something unusual happens in this function and allows the reader, for example, to confirm whether the lifetimes of the objects of interest align with the lifetime of the coroutine or not, whether some locks need to be acquired to protect some concurrently accessed data, and whether some locks need to be released before the execution reaches the suspend point.

Note, that P0054 describes how such 'no-await-required' behavior can be optionally built on top of P0057, however, due to our grave concerns about maintainability of such code we recommend against it.

Island of abstractions

(Section 4.2) Over time we may end up with a complete set of await-enabled algorithms that mirror the existing standard algorithms. These algorithms will be independent and not interoperable with the existing algorithms

Does it have to be the way P0114 describes? We don't believe so.

Embracing coroutines makes existing libraries better and leads to smaller API surface.

Paper P0055 shows how to extend the CompletionToken model so that any library that follows that model will automatically gain “negative-overhead” behavior compared to what they get with a callback model and retain the performance if they use callbacks.

The beauty of it is that it is automatic. Providing a low level API with a particular shape and a trivial templated high level wrapper allows the CompletionToken transform to do the magic. When used with coroutines, suddenly the libraries that used to do memory allocation and type erasure for every single async operation, no longer will have to. This affects the networking proposal, boost::asio, executors, etc. An additional benefit is that it reduces the number of APIs that a library needs to provide as shown at the end of P0055 paper.

The benefit of this approach extends beyond the networking library to other future standard or non-standard libraries modeling their APIs on the CompletionToken/completion_token_transform.

Conclusion

We agree with most of the concerns expressed by P0114, however all but one are not relevant to P0057. The concern that is relevant (mistake of not using the result of a function/constructor) is not unique to coroutines and is tackled by paper NoDiscard.

Our position is that for any concrete problem that can be solved with the abstractions offered by P0114, the same problem can be solved with the abstractions offered by P0057 with equal or superior characteristics of:

how much code end-user have to write to solve the problem

how much library support required to enable the abstraction

what is the abstraction penalty

References

N4287: Threads, Fibers and Couroutines (slides deck)

N4402: Resumable Functions (revision 4)

P0054: Coroutines: Reports from the field

P0055: On Interactions Between Coroutines and Networking Library

P0057: Wording for Coroutines rev3

p0114: Resumable Expressions (revision 1)

NoDiscard: P0068: Proposal of "unused", "nodiscard" and "fallthrough" attributes.

PEP0492: Coroutines with async and await syntax

EcmaScript7: JavaScript goes to Asynchronous city

HACK: Hack Language Reference

Dart: Spicing Up Dart with Side Effects