FoundationDB Flow Tutorial: Asynchronous Programming with Promises and Futures
By
SchwKatze
Hand-rolled, kettle-boiled, baked to perfection. Worth every minute at the bakery.
Summary
This article is a tutorial on Flow, a programming framework used in FoundationDB (Apple's open-source distributed transactional key-value store). It explains Flow's asynchronous message-passing system built around Promise<> and Future<> data types, which enable components to communicate without blocking. The tutorial covers Flow's new keywords, flow controls, and design patterns for C++ programmers working with FoundationDB's distributed architecture.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledThe essence of Flow is the capability of passing messages asynchronously between components.
The basic data types that connect asynchronous senders and receivers are Promise<> and Future<>.
The sender holds a Promise<X> to, sometime in the future, deliver a value of type X to the holder of the Future<X>.
Flow introduces some new keywords and flow controls. Combining these into workable units also introduces some new design patterns to C++ programmers.
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