dseeni / yasync

yasync - Yet another async/await for Nim

Requires nim devel or 2.0.

• Semantics is very close to that of Nim's std async, await and Future[T].
• await operation doesn't cause any heap allocations (except calling manually-async functions, async closures, and (mutually) recursive calls).
• callSoon is not used and async code is guaranteed to run atomically between awaits across call boundaries (TODO: maybe add an example)
• Function return type is written as T, then async transforms it to Future[T] implicitly.
• Provides optional compatibility layer for interop with existing asyncdispatch (and TODO: chronos) code. Example. The library itself is completely dispatcher agnostic, and doesn't depend on neither asyncdispatch, nor chronos.

This library introduces async, await and Future[T] similar in semantics to Nim's native ones, but implements an optimization to avoid heap allocations. Consider the following sample:

proc sleep(ms: int): Future[void] = ... # Let's assume this function doesn't allocate

proc foo(a: int): int {.async.} =
  await sleep(a)
  var b = a + 1
  return b

proc bar() {.async.} =
  let a = await foo(5)
  let b = await foo(6)
  echo a + b

waitFor bar()

If we pretend that sleep doesn't allocate, the whole waitFor operation above will not do a single allocation. The optimization happens in async functions on await calls.

TODO: Describe how it works in details

TODO:

• Recursive calls
• Generics
• Cancellation
• Nice stack traces