There are currently a number of return values from the std::comm methods, not
all of which are necessarily completely expressive:
Sender::try_send(t: T) -> bool
This method currently doesn't transmit back the data `t` if the send fails
due to the other end having disconnected. Additionally, this shares the name
of the synchronous try_send method, but it differs in semantics in that it
only has one failure case, not two (the buffer can never be full).
SyncSender::try_send(t: T) -> TrySendResult<T>
This method accurately conveys all possible information, but it uses a
custom type to the std::comm module with no convenience methods on it.
Additionally, if you want to inspect the result you're forced to import
something from `std::comm`.
SyncSender::send_opt(t: T) -> Option<T>
This method uses Some(T) as an "error value" and None as a "success value",
but almost all other uses of Option<T> have Some/None the other way
Receiver::try_recv(t: T) -> TryRecvResult<T>
Similarly to the synchronous try_send, this custom return type is lacking in
terms of usability (no convenience methods).
With this number of drawbacks in mind, I believed it was time to re-work the
return types of these methods. The new API for the comm module is:
Sender::send(t: T) -> ()
Sender::send_opt(t: T) -> Result<(), T>
SyncSender::send(t: T) -> ()
SyncSender::send_opt(t: T) -> Result<(), T>
SyncSender::try_send(t: T) -> Result<(), TrySendError<T>>
Receiver::recv() -> T
Receiver::recv_opt() -> Result<T, ()>
Receiver::try_recv() -> Result<T, TryRecvError>
The notable changes made are:
* Sender::try_send => Sender::send_opt. This renaming brings the semantics in
line with the SyncSender::send_opt method. An asychronous send only has one
failure case, unlike the synchronous try_send method which has two failure
cases (full/disconnected).
* Sender::send_opt returns the data back to the caller if the send is guaranteed
to fail. This method previously returned `bool`, but then it was unable to
retrieve the data if the data was guaranteed to fail to send. There is still a
race such that when `Ok(())` is returned the data could still fail to be
received, but that's inherent to an asynchronous channel.
* Result is now the basis of all return values. This not only adds lots of
convenience methods to all return values for free, but it also means that you
can inspect the return values with no extra imports (Ok/Err are in the
prelude). Additionally, it's now self documenting when something failed or not
because the return value has "Err" in the name.
Things I'm a little uneasy about:
* The methods send_opt and recv_opt are not returning options, but rather
results. I felt more strongly that Option was the wrong return type than the
_opt prefix was wrong, and I coudn't think of a much better name for these
methods. One possible way to think about them is to read the _opt suffix as
"optionally".
* Result<T, ()> is often better expressed as Option<T>. This is only applicable
to the recv_opt() method, but I thought it would be more consistent for
everything to return Result rather than one method returning an Option.
Despite my two reasons to feel uneasy, I feel much better about the consistency
in return values at this point, and I think the only real open question is if
there's a better suffix for {send,recv}_opt.
Closes#11527
Native timers are a much hairier thing to deal with than green timers due to the
interface that we would like to expose (both a blocking sleep() and a
channel-based interface). I ended up implementing timers in three different ways
for the various platforms that we supports.
In all three of the implementations, there is a worker thread which does send()s
on channels for timers. This worker thread is initialized once and then
communicated to in a platform-specific manner, but there's always a shared
channel available for sending messages to the worker thread.
* Windows - I decided to use windows kernel timer objects via
CreateWaitableTimer and SetWaitableTimer in order to provide sleeping
capabilities. The worker thread blocks via WaitForMultipleObjects where one of
the objects is an event that is used to wake up the helper thread (which then
drains the incoming message channel for requests).
* Linux/(Android?) - These have the ideal interface for implementing timers,
timerfd_create. Each timer corresponds to a timerfd, and the helper thread
uses epoll to wait for all active timers and then send() for the next one that
wakes up. The tricky part in this implementation is updating a timerfd, but
see the implementation for the fun details
* OSX/FreeBSD - These obviously don't have the windows APIs, and sadly don't
have the timerfd api available to them, so I have thrown together a solution
which uses select() plus a timeout in order to ad-hoc-ly implement a timer
solution for threads. The implementation is backed by a sorted array of timers
which need to fire. As I said, this is an ad-hoc solution which is certainly
not accurate timing-wise. I have done this implementation due to the lack of
other primitives to provide an implementation, and I've done it the best that
I could, but I'm sure that there's room for improvement.
I'm pretty happy with how these implementations turned out. In theory we could
drop the timerfd implementation and have linux use the select() + timeout
implementation, but it's so inaccurate that I would much rather continue to use
timerfd rather than my ad-hoc select() implementation.
The only change that I would make to the API in general is to have a generic
sleep() method on an IoFactory which doesn't require allocating a Timer object.
For everything but windows it's super-cheap to request a blocking sleep for a
set amount of time, and it's probably worth it to provide a sleep() which
doesn't do something like allocate a file descriptor on linux.
