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future.scala <a href="http://thoughtworks.com/"><img align="right" src="https://www.thoughtworks.com/imgs/tw-logo.png" alt="ThoughtWorks" height="15"/></a>

future.scala is the spiritual successor to Stateless Future for stack-safe asynchronous programming in pure functional flavor. We dropped the Stateless Future's built-in async/await support, in favor of more general monadic/each syntax provided by ThoughtWorks Each.

future.scala provide an API similar to scala.concurrent.Future or scalaz.concurrent.Task, except future.scala does not throw the StackOverflowError.

Design

future.scala inherits many design decision from Stateless Future.

Statelessness

future.scala are pure functional, thus they will never store result values or exceptions. Instead, future.scala evaluate lazily, and they do the same job every time you invoke onComplete.

Also, there is no isComplete method in our futures. As a result, the users of future.scala are forced not to share futures between threads, not to check the states in futures. They have to care about control flows instead of threads, and build the control flows by creating futures.

Threading-free Model

There are too many threading models and implementations in the Java/Scala world, java.util.concurrent.Executor, scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext, javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater, java.util.Timer, ... It is very hard to communicate between threading models. When a developer is working with multiple threading models, he must very carefully pass messages between threading models, or he have to maintain bulks of synchronized methods to properly deal with the shared variables between threads.

Why does he need multiple threading models? Because the libraries that he uses depend on different threading modes. For example, you must update Swing components in the Swing's UI thread, you must specify java.util.concurrent.ExecutionServices for java.nio.channels.CompletionHandler, and, you must specify scala.concurrent.ExecutionContexts for scala.concurrent.Future and scala.async.Async. Oops!

Think about somebody who uses Swing to develop a text editor software. He wants to create a state machine to update UI. He have heard the cool scala.async, then he uses the cool "A-Normal Form" expression in async to build the state machine that updates UI, and he types import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits._ to suppress the compiler errors. Everything looks pretty, except the software always crashes.

Fortunately, future.scala depends on none of these threading model, and cooperates with all of these threading models. If the poor guy tries future.scala, replacing async { } to monadic[Future] { }, deleting the import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits._, he will find that everything looks pretty like before, and does not crash any more. That's why threading-free model is important.

Exception Handling

There were two Future implementations in Scala standard library, scala.actors.Future and scala.concurrent.Future. scala.actors.Futures are not designed to handling exceptions, since exceptions are always handled by actors. There is no way to handle a particular exception in a particular subrange of an actor.

Unlike scala.actors.Futures, scala.concurrent.Futures are designed to handle exceptions. Unfortunately, scala.concurrent.Futures provide too many mechanisms to handle an exception. For example:

import scala.concurrent.Await
import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext
import scala.concurrent.duration.Duration
import scala.util.control.Exception.Catcher
import scala.concurrent.forkjoin.ForkJoinPool
val threadPool = new ForkJoinPool()
val catcher1: Catcher[Unit] = { case e: Exception => println("catcher1") }
val catcher2: Catcher[Unit] = {
  case e: java.io.IOException => println("catcher2")
  case other: Exception => throw new RuntimeException(other)
}
val catcher3: Catcher[Unit] = {
  case e: java.io.IOException => println("catcher3")
  case other: Exception => throw new RuntimeException(other)
}
val catcher4: Catcher[Unit] = { case e: Exception => println("catcher4") }
val catcher5: Catcher[Unit] = { case e: Exception => println("catcher5") }
val catcher6: Catcher[Unit] = { case e: Exception => println("catcher6") }
val catcher7: Catcher[Unit] = { case e: Exception => println("catcher7") }
def future1 = scala.concurrent.future { 1 }(ExecutionContext.fromExecutor(threadPool, catcher1))
def future2 = scala.concurrent.Future.failed(new Exception)
val composedFuture = future1.flatMap { _ => future2 }(ExecutionContext.fromExecutor(threadPool, catcher2))
composedFuture.onFailure(catcher3)(ExecutionContext.fromExecutor(threadPool, catcher4))
composedFuture.onFailure(catcher5)(ExecutionContext.fromExecutor(threadPool, catcher6))
try { Await.result(composedFuture, Duration.Inf) } catch { case e if catcher7.isDefinedAt(e) => catcher7(e) }

Is any sane developer able to tell which catchers will receive the exceptions?

There are too many concepts about exceptions when you work with scala.concurrent.Future. You have to remember the different exception handling strategies between flatMap, recover, recoverWith and onFailure, and the difference between scala.concurrent.Future.failed(new Exception) and scala.concurrent.future { throw new Exception }.

scala.async does not make things better, because scala.async will produce a compiler error for every await in a try statement.

Fortunately, you can get rid of all those concepts if you switch to future.scala. There is neither executor implicit parameter in flatMap or map in future.scala, nor onFailure nor recover method at all. You just simply try, and things get done. See the examples to learn that.

Tail Call Optimization

Tail call optimization is an important feature for pure functional programming. Without tail call optimization, many recursive algorithm will fail at run-time, and you will get the well-known StackOverflowError.

future.scala project is internally based on scalaz.Trampoline, and automatically performs tail call optimization in the monadic[com.thoughtworks.future.Future] { ??? } blocks, without any additional special syntax.

Here is a trivial example:

import scalaz.syntax.all._
import com.thoughtworks.raii.asynchronous._
import com.thoughtworks.continuation._

def v: UnitContinuation[Unit] = UnitContinuation.now(Unit)

def f(x: Int): UnitContinuation[Unit] = v.flatMap { _ => g(x+1) }

def g(x: Int): UnitContinuation[Unit] = v.flatMap { _ => f(x+1) }

Calling f(0).blockingAwait results in an infinite loop without stack overflow. Mutually recursive calls are also fine in this case, as long as the calls are tail calls.

See this example. The example creates 30000 stack levels recursively. And it just works, without any StackOverflowError or OutOfMemoryError. Note that if you port this example for scala.async it will throw an OutOfMemoryError or a TimeoutException.

Links

• API Documentation
• Gitter Room

Related projects

• Scalaz provides type classes and underlying data structures for this project.
• ThoughtWorks Each provides monadic/each-like syntax which can be used with this project.
• tryt.scala provides exception handling monad transformers for this project.
• RAII.scala uses this project for asynchronous automatic resource management.
• DeepLearning.scala uses this project for asynchronous executed neural networks.
• continuation.scala is the continuation library used by this project.