Re: Future cancellation

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Ron Buckton <rbuckton@chronicles.org> wrote:
> I’ve created separate gists for three different ways that I am currently
> investigating as a means to support the cancellation of a Future. These can
> be found here:
>
>
>
> 1.       Cancellation using Future: https://gist.github.com/rbuckton/5486149
>
> 2.       Cancellation using Future.cancelable:
> https://gist.github.com/rbuckton/5484591
>
> 3.       Cancellation using Future#cancel:
> https://gist.github.com/rbuckton/5484478
>
>
>
> Each has a list of some of the benefits and issues I’ve seen while
> experimenting with each approach, as well as possible changes to the various
> APIs or algorithms for Future to make each happen.
>
>
>
> In general, cancellation of a Future can be beneficial in a number of cases.
> One example is the case where you are requesting a resource from a remote
> server using XHR. If the request was being made to fetch a page of data, and
> the user opted to move to the next page before the current page completed
> loading, it no longer becomes necessary to continue fetching the remote
> resource. In addition, it is no longer necessary to handle any additional
> computation or transformation logic that would have resulted from the
> successful completion of the fetch operation. Having the ability to cancel
> the request allows an application to quickly release resources that it no
> longer needs.
>
>
>
> It is also useful to be able to handle the cancelation of a long running
> task that might be executing in a Worker. In this case, cleanup logic that
> is part of cancelation would request the worker to close, ending the current
> operation and releasing resources.
>
>
>
> Both of the above examples are indicative of cancelling the root of an
> operation, but there are also circumstances where you might want to cancel a
> chained Future and any Future chained from it, without canceling the root.
> In the previous example regarding paged data, I might wish to allow the
> fetch operation to complete so that I could cache the data for quick
> retrieval, but would only want to cancel any possible UI updates that might
> occur in a chained Future.
>
>
>
> I’m interested to hear what others think with respect to properly handling
> cancellation with Futures.

I do not think that we should add cancellation on the base Future
interface. I.e. we shouldn't make *all* Futures cancellable.

Cancelability should only be possible when the implementation of the
Future would actually stop doing work if the Future is cancelled. I.e.
cancelling a Future shouldn't simply prevent the result callbacks from
being called, but it should prevent whatever work is needed to
calculate the result from happening.

However it would be very complex and expensive if we had to make all
APIs that want to use Futures also support being cancelled.

The solution is to create a subclass of Future which allows the
back-end work to be cancelled. I.e. a CancelableFuture, or
AbortableFuture. This subclass would have a .cancel() or .abort()
method on it. The FutureResolver created when the CancelableFuture is
created would have a callback which is called when .cancel()/.abort()
is called.

This would be useful if we create an Future-based API for doing
network requests or file reading.

In other words, the should be the choice of the implementor of a given
API to determine if it wants to return a Future which can be
cancelled, or one that can't. Obviously this needs to be documented
for that API, just like you document that the API returns a Future at
all.

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2013 23:48:00 UTC