How to wait for several Futures?

Question

Suppose I have several futures and need to wait until either any of them fails or all of them succeed.

For example: Let there are 3 futures:

Answer 1

You can use a promise, and send to it either the first failure, or the final completed aggregated success:

def sequenceOrBailOut[A, M[_] <: TraversableOnce[_]](in: M[Future[A]] with TraversableOnce[Future[A]])(implicit cbf: CanBuildFrom[M[Future[A]], A, M[A]], executor: ExecutionContext): Future[M[A]] = {
  val p = Promise[M[A]]()

  // the first Future to fail completes the promise
  in.foreach(_.onFailure{case i => p.tryFailure(i)})

  // if the whole sequence succeeds (i.e. no failures)
  // then the promise is completed with the aggregated success
  Future.sequence(in).foreach(p trySuccess _)

  p.future
}

Then you can Await on that resulting Future if you want to block, or just map it into something else.

The difference with for comprehension is that here you get the error of the first to fail, whereas with for comprehension you get the first error in traversal order of the input collection (even if another one failed first). For example:

val f1 = Future { Thread.sleep(1000) ; 5 / 0 }
val f2 = Future { 5 }
val f3 = Future { None.get }

Future.sequence(List(f1,f2,f3)).onFailure{case i => println(i)}
// this waits one second, then prints "java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero"
// the first to fail in traversal order

And:

val f1 = Future { Thread.sleep(1000) ; 5 / 0 }
val f2 = Future { 5 }
val f3 = Future { None.get }

sequenceOrBailOut(List(f1,f2,f3)).onFailure{case i => println(i)}
// this immediately prints "java.util.NoSuchElementException: None.get"
// the 'actual' first to fail (usually...)
// and it returns early (it does not wait 1 sec)