Select
A select operation waits until any of a set of futures is ready, and responds to
that future's result. In JavaScript, this is similar to Promise.race
. In
Python, it compares to
asyncio.wait(task_set, return_when=asyncio.FIRST_COMPLETED)
.
Similar to a match statement, the body of select!
has a number of arms, each
of the form pattern = future => statement
. When a future
is ready, its
return value is destructured by the pattern
. The statement
is then run with
the resulting variables. The statement
result becomes the result of the
select!
macro.
use tokio::sync::mpsc; use tokio::time::{sleep, Duration}; #[tokio::main] async fn main() { let (tx, mut rx) = mpsc::channel(32); let listener = tokio::spawn(async move { tokio::select! { Some(msg) = rx.recv() => println!("got: {msg}"), _ = sleep(Duration::from_millis(50)) => println!("timeout"), }; }); sleep(Duration::from_millis(10)).await; tx.send(String::from("Hello!")).await.expect("Failed to send greeting"); listener.await.expect("Listener failed"); }
-
The
listener
async block here is a common form: wait for some async event, or for a timeout. Change thesleep
to sleep longer to see it fail. Why does thesend
also fail in this situation? -
select!
is also often used in a loop in "actor" architectures, where a task reacts to events in a loop. That has some pitfalls, which will be discussed in the next segment.