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QCoro 0.5.0 Release Announcement

Major features:

  • .then() continuation for Task<T>
  • All asynchronous operations now return Task<T>
  • Timeouts for many operations
  • Support for QThread

.then() continuation for Task

Sometimes it's not possible to co_await a coroutine - usually because you need to integrate with a 3rd party code that is not coroutine-ready. A good example might be implementing QAbstractItemModel, where none of the virtual methods are coroutines and thus it's not possible to use co_await in them.

To still make it possible to all coroutines from such code, QCoro::Task<T> now has a new method: .then(), which allows attaching a continuation callback that will be invoked by QCoro when the coroutine represented by the Task finishes.

void notACoroutine() {
    someCoroutineReturningQString().then([](const QString &result) {
        // Will be invoked when the someCoroutine() finishes.
        // The result of the coroutine is passed as an argument to the continuation.
    });
}

The continuation itself might be a coroutine, and the result of the .then() member function is again a Task<R> (where R is the return type of the continuation callback), so it is possible to chain multiple continuations as well as co_awaiting the entire chain.

All asynchronous operations now return Task<T>

Up until now each operation from the QCoro wrapper types returned a special awaitable - for example, QCoroIODevice::read() returned QCoro::detail::QCoroIODevice::ReadOperation. In most cases users of QCoro do not need to concern themselves with that type, since they can still directly co_await the returned awaitable.

However, it unnecessarily leaks implementation details of QCoro into public API and it makes it harded to return a coroutine from a non-coroutine function.

As of QCoro 0.5.0, all the operations now return Task<T>, which makes the API consistent. As a secondary effect, all the operations can have a chained continuation using the .then() continuation, as described above.

Timeout support for many operations

Qt doesn't allow specifying timeout for many operations, because they are typically non-blocking. But the timeout makes sense in most QCoro cases, because they are combination of wait + the non-blocking operation. Let's take QIODevice::read() for example: the Qt version doesn't have any timeout, because the call will never block - if there's nothing to read, it simply returns an empty QByteArray.

On the other hand, QCoroIODevice::read() is an asynchronous operation, because under to hood, it's a coroutine that asynchronously calls a sequence of

device->waitForReadyRead();
device->read();

Since QIODevice::waitForReadyRead() takes a timeout argument, it makes sense for QCoroIODevice::read() to also take (an optional) timeout argument. This and many other operations have gained support for timeout.

Support for QThread

It's been a while since I added a new wrapper for a Qt class, so QCoro 0.5.0 adds wrapper for QThread. It's now possible to co_await thread start and end:

std::unique_ptr<QThread> thread(QThread::create([]() {
    ...
});
ui->setLabel(tr("Starting thread...");
thread->start();
co_await qCoro(thread)->waitForStarted();
ui->setLabel(tr("Calculating..."));
co_await qCoro(thread)->waitForFinished();
ui->setLabel(tr("Finished!"));

Full changelog

See changelog on Github

Thanks to everyone who contributed to QCoro!