amp/docs/futures

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A Future is an object representing the eventual result of an asynchronous operation. There are three states:

• Completed successfully: The future has been completed successfully.
• Errored: The future failed with an exception.
• Pending: The future is still pending.

A successfully completed future is analog to a return value, while an errored future is analog to throwing an exception.

Futures are the basic unit of concurrency in asynchronous applications. These objects should be thought of as placeholders for values or tasks that might not be complete immediately.

Another way to approach asynchronous APIs is using callbacks that are passed when the operation is started and called once it completes:

doSomething(function ($error, $value) {
    if ($error) {
        /* ... */
    } else {
        /* ... */
    }
});

The callback approach has several drawbacks.

• Passing callbacks and doing further actions in them that depend on the result of the first action gets messy really quickly.
• An explicit callback is required as input parameter to the function, and the return value is simply unused. There's no way to use this API without involving a callback.

That's where futures come into play. They're simple placeholders that are returned and allow a callback (or several callbacks) to be registered.

try {
    $value = doSomething()->await();
} catch (...) {
    /* ... */
}

We can now write helper functions like Amp\Promise\all() which subscribe to several of those placeholders and combine them. We don't have to write any complicated code to combine the results of several operations.

Future Creation

Futures can be created in several ways. Most code will use Amp\async() which takes a function and runs it as coroutine.

Immediately Available Results

Sometimes results are immediately available. This might be due to them being cached, but can also be the case if an interface mandates a Future to be returned. In these cases Future::complete(mixed) and Future::error(Throwable) can be used to construct an immediately completed Future.

DeferredFuture

{:.note}

The DeferredFuture API described below is an advanced API that many applications probably don't need. Use Amp\async() or combinators instead where possible.

Amp\DeferredFuture is the abstraction responsible for resolving future values once they become available. A library that resolves values asynchronously creates an Amp\DeferredFuture and uses it to return an Amp\Future to API consumers. Once the library determines that the value is ready, it resolves the Future held by the API consumer using methods on the linked DeferredFuture.

final class DeferredFuture
{
    public function getFuture(): Future;
    public function complete(mixed $value = null);
    public function error(Throwable $throwable);
}

getFuture()

Returns the corresponding Future instance. DeferredFuture and Future are separated, so the consumer of the Future can't complete it. You should always return Future to API consumers. If you're passing DeferredFuture objects around, you're probably doing something wrong.

complete()

Completes the future with the first parameter as value, otherwise null. Instances of Amp\Future are not supported; Use Future::await() before calling DeferredFuture::complete() in such cases.

error()

Makes the future fail.

Future Example

Here's a simple example of an async value producer asyncMultiply() creating a DeferredFuture and returning the associated Future to its API consumer.

<?php // Example async producer using DeferredFuture

use Revolt\EventLoop;

function asyncMultiply(int $x, int $y): Future
{
    $deferred = new Amp\DeferredFuture;

    // Resolve the async result one second from now
    EventLoop::delay(1, function () use ($deferred, $x, $y) {
        $deferred->resolve($x * $y);
    });

    return $deferred->getFuture();
}

$future = asyncMultiply(6, 7);
$result = $future->await();

var_dump($result); // int(42)