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0 pointsasdkhadsj6y ago0 comments

If you're familiar with this, can you describe some of those new concepts in ... slightly more detail? I say slightly, because I'm still seeking high level explanations, but at the same time I'm curious what new features might be making this async lifetime talk possible.

To further frame that question: I had assumed Rust was implementing Async within the capabilities of normal Rust. Such that, if lifetimes were being managed across function bounds, I assumed the lifetime would have "simply" been bound to the scope of the executor, polling the future you're actively waiting on.

However quickly I can see confusions in that description. Normal lifetimes within a function would need to bubble up and be managed by a parent, since that function's lifetime is, as you put it, being jumped in and out of frequently.

So I imagine that is partly where new features come into play? Giving Rust the ability to take a normal lifetime and extend or manage it in new ways?

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GolDDranks6y ago

I'm not going to elaborate super deeply in a HN comment, but here's the gist: inside a function body, you can take a reference to a thing, and store that reference in a variable. Then if that function were "yields" to the executor, we have a situation that we couldn't have with sync code: in sync code, the "yielding" only happens at the function return, and by that point, all the internal references must be gone, as the function stack frame is going to disappear. But with async, as the yielding can happen without the function actually ending, we have to be able to store the stack frame, and the references stay alive. The new feature helps the compiler to reason about this. Before the "yields" were implemented as just returns, so the compiler didn't allow borrowing over yield points.

asdkhadsjOP6y ago

Ah hah, that sounds awesome, thanks!

Yea my past experience with Futures in Rust, mostly manually, made them feel like they were "No magic, just Rust" and so the Yields were just a lot of returns.

I had thought the .await impl was largely just standardization around the syntaxes. Something you could do manually, so to say.

The yielding holding the stack frame, in my head then, sounds quite similar to actually returning. However, it's a special return that stashes that stack somewhere for later use. Neat!

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