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.
// Copyright 2024 Google LLC
// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
use tokio::sync::mpsc;
use tokio::time::{Duration, sleep};
#[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");
}
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The
listenerasync block here is a common form: wait for some async event, or for a timeout. Change thesleepto sleep longer to see it fail. Why does thesendalso fail in this situation? -
select!is also frequently 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.