Coroutines: More Details

Typical Use-Cases

Coroutines are the natural way to write event-driven applications; e.g. simulations, games, servers, user interfaces, or even algorithms. Coroutines are typically used for cooperative multitasking. The key to cooperative multitasking is that each task takes as much time as it needs. This is in contrast to pre-emptive multitasking, for which we have a scheduler that decides how long each task gets the CPU.

That being said, there are different kinds of coroutines.

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Underlying Concepts

Coroutines in C++20 are asymmetric, first-class, and stackless.

The workflow of an asymmetric coroutine goes back to the caller. This will not hold for a symmetric coroutine. A symmetric coroutine can delegate its workflow to another coroutine.

First-class coroutines are similar to First-Class Functions since coroutines behave like data. This means that you can use them as an argument to return value from a function, or store them in a variable.

A stackless coroutine enables it to suspend and resume the top-level coroutine, but this coroutine can not invoke another coroutine.

Proposal N4402 describes the design goals of coroutines.

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Design Goals

Coroutines should

• be highly scalable (to billions of concurrent coroutines).
• have highly efficient resume and suspend operations comparable in cost to the overhead of a function.
• seamlessly interact with existing facilities with no overhead.
• have open ended coroutine machinery allowing library designers to develop coroutine libraries exposing various high-level semantics such as generators, goroutines, tasks and more.
• usable in environments where exceptions are forbidden or not available.

There are four reasons for a function to become a coroutine.

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Becoming a Coroutine

A function will become a coroutine if it uses,

• co_return, or
• co_await, or
• co_yield, or a
• co_await expression in a range-based for-loop.

This explanation was from proposal N4628.

Finally, I will discuss the new keywords co_return, co_yield, and co_await.

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co_return, co_yield, and co_await

co_return: a coroutine uses co_return as its return statement.

co_yield: thanks to co_yield you can implement a generator. This means you can create a generator that will generate an infinite data stream from which you can successively query values. The return type of the generator generator<int> generatorForNumbers(int begin, int inc= 1) is generator<int>. generator<int> internally holds a special promise p such that a call co_yield i is equivalent to a call co_await p.yield_value(i). co_yield i can be called an arbitrary number of times. Immediately after the call, the execution of the coroutine will be suspended.

co_await: co_await eventually causes the execution of the coroutine to be suspended and resumed. The expression exp in co_await exp has to be a so-called awaitable expression, and exp has to implement a specific interface. This interface consists of the three functions: e.await_ready, e.await_suspend, and e.await_resume.

The typical use case for co_await is a server that waits for events.