Is it possible to “await yield return DoSomethingAsync()”

Question

Are regular iterator blocks (i.e. \"yield return\") incompatible with \"async\" and \"await\"?

This gives a good idea of what I\'m trying to do:

asyn         


        

Answer 1

There was a plan to do

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/43

But currently it not possible

Answer 2

What you are describing can be accomplished with the Task.WhenAll method. Notice how the code turns into a simple one-liner. What happens is that each individual url begins downloading and then WhenAll is used combine those operations into a single Task which can be awaited.

Task<IEnumerable<string>> DownLoadAllUrls(string[] urls)
{
    return Task.WhenAll(from url in urls select DownloadHtmlAsync(url));
}

Answer 3

tl;dr Iterators as implemented with yield are a blocking construct, so as of right now await and yield are incompatible.

Long Because iterating over an IEnumerable is a blocking operation, calling a method marked as async will still execute it in a blocking manner, since it has to wait for that operation to finish.

async Task<IEnumerable<Foo>> Method(String [] Strs)
{
  foreach(var str in strs)
  {
    yield return await DoSomethingAsync( str)
  }
}  

The awaiting Method mixes meanings. Do you want to wait until the Task has an IEnumerable and then block on iterating over it? Or are you trying to await each value of the IEnumerable?

I assume the second is the desired behavior and in that case the existing Iterator semantics will not work. The IEnumerator<T> interface is basically

public interface IEnumerator<T>
  T Current;
  bool MoveNext();
}

I'm ignoring Reset() since it makes no sense for a sequence of asynchronous results. But what you would need is something like this:

public interface IAsyncEnumerator<T>
  T Current;
  Task<bool> MoveNext();
}

Of course, foreach also won't work with this and you'd have to iterate manually like this:

var moveNext = await asyncEnumerator.MoveNext();
while(moveNext) {

  // get the value that was fetche asynchronously
  var v = asyncEnumerator.Current;

  // do something with that value

  // suspend current execution context until next value arrives or we are done
  moveNext = await asyncEnumerator.MoveNext();
}