Re: Cancellation architectural observations

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 6:32 AM, Gray Zhang <otakustay@icloud.com> wrote:

> +1 to the ignore term, I’ve opened an issue about it in
> https://github.com/promises-aplus/cancellation-spec/issues/14
>
I have little attachment to any term, but there's value in keeping
terminology that has years of investment and use in other contexts. However
"ignore" also has the wrong sense, because it implies that the computation
completes anyway. That can be accomplished more easily by simply dropping
the promise.

> IMO the term cancel(or abort) and ignore are totally different things,
> the former one means “do not continue, stop it right now” and the “stop”
> state should be broadcast to everyone who is interested in the work, while
> the latter means “I don’t care about the result anymore, just play it as
> you like”, it means the async progress can be continued
>
 This goes back to some of the observations above: you cannot stop it
"right now" because async notification is not synchronous; indeed the
operation may already be complete before you stop it. Thus consumers of the
result of a cancellable request need to be able to handle either successful
completion or the cancelled state (which just looks like any other error
that prevented completion).  Attempting broadcast to "everyone" adds
complexity and resources that are needed only in the rare cancellation
case. It's typically not only not worth the software complexity, but not a
good idea. When you cancel a print job, the document editor should make
best efforts in the background to stop requesting fonts, stop laying out
print pages, stop spitting out pages on the printer, etc. but most
importantly, it should start paying attention to my new edits and hang
waiting for everything that might be involved in printing to wrap itself up.

> In practice both scenario are commonly seen, we may abort a resource
> fetch in order to save bandwidth and opened connections, or we may in other
> side just ignore it since continue to complete the fetch can result in a
> local cache, which speeds up our fetch next time
>
The resource point is important. That's the "don't care" scenario, not the
"abort" scenario. It's the request processor that knows what cleanup is
worth the effort. The initiator of the request only knows they don't care
about the result anymore.