I'm pretty new to functional programming so this might be a question due to misconception, but I can't get my head around this - from an OOP point of view it seems so obvious...
scenario:
Assume you have an actor or micro-service like architecture approach where messages/requests are sent to some components that handle them and reply. Assume now, one of the components stores some of the data from the requests for future requests (e.g. it calculates a value and stores it in a cache so that the next time the same request occurs, no calculation is needed).
The data can be hold in memory.
question:
How do you in functional programming in general, and especially in f#, handle such a scenario? I guess a static dictionary is not a functional approach and I don't want to include any external things like data stores if possible.
Or more precise:
If an application creates data that will be used later in the processing again, where do we store the data?
example: You have an application that executes some sort of tasks on some initial data. First, you store the inital data (e.g. add it to a dictionary), then you execute the first task that does some processing based on a subset of the data, then you execute the second task that adds additional data and so on until all tasks are done...
Now the basic approach (from my understanding) would be to define the data and use the tasks as some sort of processing-chain that forward the processed data, like initial-data -> task-1 -> task-2 -> ... -> done
but that does not fit an architecture where getting/adding data is done message-based and asynchronous.
approach:
My initial approach was this
type Record = { }
let private dummyStore = new System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentBag<Record>()
let search comparison =
let matchingRecords = dummyStore |> Seq.where (comparison)
if matchingRecords |> Seq.isEmpty
then EmptyFailedRequest
else Record (matchingRecords |> Seq.head)
let initialize initialData =
initialData |> Seq.iter (dummyStore.Add)
let add newRecord =
dummyStore.Add(newRecord)
encapsulated in a module that looks to me like an OOP approach.
After #Gustavo asked me to provide an example and considering his suggestion I've realized that I could do it like this (go one level higher to the place where the functions are actually called):
let handleMessage message store =
// all the operations from above but now with Seq<Record> -> ... -> Seq<Record>
store
let agent = MailboxProcessor.Start(fun inbox->
let rec messageLoop store = async{
let! msg = inbox.Receive()
let modifiedStore = handleMessage msg store
return! messageLoop modifiedStore
}
messageLoop Seq.empty
)
This answers the question for me well since it removed mutability and shared state at all. But when just looking at the first approach, I cannot think of any solution w/o the collection outside the functions
Please note that this question is in f# to explain the environment, the syntax etc. I don't want a solution that works because f# is multi-paradigm, I would like to get a functional approach for that.
I've read all questions that I could find on SO so far but they either prove the theoretical possibility or they use collections for this scenario - if duplicated please point me the right direction.
You can use a technique called memoization which is very common in FP.
And it consists precisely on keeping a dictionary with the calculated values.
Here's a sample implementation:
open System
open System.Collections.Concurrent
let getOrAdd (a:ConcurrentDictionary<'A,'B>) (b:_->_) k = a.GetOrAdd(k, b)
let memoize f =
let dic = new ConcurrentDictionary<_,_>()
getOrAdd dic f
Note that with memoize you can decorate any function and get a memoized version of it. Here's a sample:
let f x =
printfn "calculating f (%i)" x
2 * x
let g = memoize f // g is the memoized version of f
// test
> g 5 ;;
calculating f (5)
val it : int = 10
> g 5 ;;
val it : int = 10
You can see that in the second execution the value was not calculated.
As my limited (or even wrong) understanding, both Async.StartImmediate and Async.RunSynchronously start an async computation on current thread. Then what is exactly the difference between these two functions? Can anyone help explain?
Update:
After looking into F# source code at https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/control.fs, I think I kind of understand what happens. Async.StartImmediate starts the async on the current thread. After it hits an async binding, whether it will continue to run on the current thread depends on the async binding itself. For example, if the async binding calls Async.SwitchToThreadPool, it will run on ThreadPool instead of the current thread. In this case, you will need to call Async.SwitchToContext if you want to go back to the current thread. Otherwise, if the async binding doesn’t do any switch to other threads, Async.StartImmediate will continue to execute the async binding on the current thread. In this case, there is no need to call Async.SwitchToContext if you simply want to stay on the current thread.
The reason why Dax Fohl’s example works on GUI thread is because Async.Sleep carefully captures
the SynchronizationContext.Current and makes sure the continuation run in the captured context using
SynchronizationContext.Post(). See https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/control.fs#L1631, where unprotectedPrimitiveWithResync wrapper changes the “args.cont” (the continuation)
to be a Post to the captured context (see: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/control.fs#L1008 — trampolineHolder.Post is basically SynchronizationContext.Post). This will only work
when SynchronizationContext.Current is not null, which is always the case for GUI thread. Especially,
if you run in a console app with StartImmediate, you will find Async.Sleep will indeed go to ThreadPool, because the main thread in console app doesn’t have SynchronizationContext.Current.
So to summarize, this indeed works with GUI thread because certain functions like Async.Sleep, Async.AwaitWaitHandle etc carefully capture and makes sure to post back to the previous context.
It looks this is a deliberate behavior, however this doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere in the MSDN.
Async.RunSynchronously waits until the entire computation is completed. So use this any time you need to run an async computation from regular code and need to wait for the result. Simple enough.
Async.StartImmediate ensures that the computation is run within the current context but doesn't wait until the entire expression is finished. The most common use for this (for me, at least) is when you want to run a computation on the GUI thread, asynchronously. For example if you wanted to do three things on the GUI thread at 1-second intervals, you could write
async {
do! Async.Sleep 1000
doThing1()
do! Async.Sleep 1000
doThing2()
do! Async.Sleep 1000
doThing3()
} |> Async.StartImmediate
That will ensure everything gets called in the GUI thread (assuming you call that from the GUI thread), but won't block the GUI thread for the whole 3 seconds. If you use RunSynchronously there, it'll block the GUI thread for the duration and your screen will become unresponsive.
(If you haven't done GUI programming, then just note that updates to GUI controls all have to be done from the same thread, which can be difficult to coordinate manually; the above takes away a lot of the pain).
To give another example, here:
// Async.StartImmediate
async {
printfn "Running"
do! Async.Sleep 1000
printfn "Finished"
} |> Async.StartImmediate
printfn "Next"
> Running
> Next
// 1 sec later
> Finished
// Async.RunSynchronously
async {
printfn "Running"
do! Async.Sleep 1000
printfn "Finished"
} |> Async.RunSynchronously
printfn "Next"
> Running
// 1 sec later
> Finished
> Next
// Async.Start just for completion:
async {
printfn "Running"
do! Async.Sleep 1000
printfn "Finished"
} |> Async.Start
printfn "Next"
> Next
> Running // With possible race condition since they're two different threads.
// 1 sec later
> Finished
Also note that Async.StartImmediate can't return a value (since it doesn't run to completion before continuing), whereas RunSynchronously can.
The Computer Language Benchmarks Game's F# entry for Threadring contains a seemingly useless line: if false then (). When I comment out this line, the program runs much faster (~2s vs ~55s for an input of 50000000) and produces the same result. How does this work? Why is this line there? What exactly is the compiler doing with what appears to be a no-op?
The code:
let ringLength = 503
let cells = Array.zeroCreate ringLength
let threads = Array.zeroCreate ringLength
let answer = ref -1
let createWorker i =
let next = (i+1)%ringLength
async { let value = cells.[i]
if false then ()
match value with
| 0 -> answer := i+1
| _ ->
cells.[next] <- value - 1
return! threads.[next] }
[<EntryPoint>]
let main args =
cells.[0] <- if args.Length>0 then int args.[0] else 50000000
for i in 0..ringLength-1 do
threads.[i]<-createWorker i
let result = Async.StartImmediate(threads.[0])
printfn "%d" !answer
0
I wrote this code originally. I don't remember the exact reason I added the line, but I'm guessing that, without it, the optimizer would do something I thought was outside of the spirit of the benchmark game. The reason for using asyncs in the first place is to achieve tail-call continuation to the next async (which is what makes this perform so much better than C# mono).
- Jomo
If the computation expression contains if false then () then the asynchronous workflow gets translated a bit differently. With the line, it uses async.Combine. Slightly simplified code looks like:
async.Delay(fun () ->
value = cells.[i]
async.Combine
( async.Return(if false then ())
async.Delay(fun () ->
match value with (...) ) ))
The translation inserts Combine because the (potentially) asynchronous computation done by if loop needs to be combined with the following code. Now, if you delete if you get something like:
async.Delay(fun () ->
value = cells.[i]
match value with (...) ) ))
The difference is that now a lot more work is done immediately in the function passed to Delay.
EDIT: I thought this caused a difference because the code uses Async.StartImmediate instead of Async.Start, but that does not seem to be the case. In fact, I do not understand why the code uses asynchronous workflows at all...
EDIT II.: I'm not entirely sure about Mono, but it definitely does replicate in the F# interactive - there, the version with Combine is about 4 times slower (which is what I'd expect, because of the function allocation overhead).
I am trying to learn how async and let! work in F#.
All the docs i've read seem confusing.
What's the point of running an async block with Async.RunSynchronously? Is this async or sync? Looks like a contradiction.
The documentation says that Async.StartImmediate runs in the current thread. If it runs in the same thread, it doesn't look very asynchronous to me... Or maybe asyncs are more like coroutines rather than threads. If so, when do they yield back an forth?
Quoting MS docs:
The line of code that uses let! starts the computation, and then the thread is suspended
until the result is available, at which point execution continues.
If the thread waits for the result, why should i use it? Looks like plain old function call.
And what does Async.Parallel do? It receives a sequence of Async<'T>. Why not a sequence of plain functions to be executed in parallel?
I think i'm missing something very basic here. I guess after i understand that, all the documentation and samples will start making sense.
A few things.
First, the difference between
let resp = req.GetResponse()
and
let! resp = req.AsyncGetReponse()
is that for the probably hundreds of milliseconds (an eternity to the CPU) where the web request is 'at sea', the former is using one thread (blocked on I/O), whereas the latter is using zero threads. This is the most common 'win' for async: you can write non-blocking I/O that doesn't waste any threads waiting for hard disks to spin around or network requests to return. (Unlike most other languages, you aren't forced to do inversion of control and factor things into callbacks.)
Second, Async.StartImmediate will start an async on the current thread. A typical use is with a GUI, you have some GUI app that wants to e.g. update the UI (e.g. to say "loading..." somewhere), and then do some background work (load something off disk or whatever), and then return to the foreground UI thread to update the UI when completed ("done!"). StartImmediate enables an async to update the UI at the start of the operation and to capture the SynchronizationContext so that at the end of the operation is can return to the GUI to do a final update of the UI.
Next, Async.RunSynchronously is rarely used (one thesis is that you call it at most once in any app). In the limit, if you wrote your entire program async, then in the "main" method you would call RunSynchronously to run the program and wait for the result (e.g. to print out the result in a console app). This does block a thread, so it is typically only useful at the very 'top' of the async portion of your program, on the boundary back with synch stuff. (The more advanced user may prefer StartWithContinuations - RunSynchronously is kinda the "easy hack" to get from async back to sync.)
Finally, Async.Parallel does fork-join parallelism. You could write a similar function that just takes functions rather than asyncs (like stuff in the TPL), but the typical sweet spot in F# is parallel I/O-bound computations, which are already async objects, so this is the most commonly useful signature. (For CPU-bound parallelism, you could use asyncs, but you could also use TPL just as well.)
The usage of async is to save the number of threads in usage.
See the following example:
let fetchUrlSync url =
let req = WebRequest.Create(Uri url)
use resp = req.GetResponse()
use stream = resp.GetResponseStream()
use reader = new StreamReader(stream)
let contents = reader.ReadToEnd()
contents
let sites = ["http://www.bing.com";
"http://www.google.com";
"http://www.yahoo.com";
"http://www.search.com"]
// execute the fetchUrlSync function in parallel
let pagesSync = sites |> PSeq.map fetchUrlSync |> PSeq.toList
The above code is what you want to do: define a function and execute in parallel. So why do we need async here?
Let's consider something big. E.g. if the number of sites is not 4, but say, 10,000! Then There needs 10,000 threads to run them in parallel, which is a huge resource cost.
While in async:
let fetchUrlAsync url =
async { let req = WebRequest.Create(Uri url)
use! resp = req.AsyncGetResponse()
use stream = resp.GetResponseStream()
use reader = new StreamReader(stream)
let contents = reader.ReadToEnd()
return contents }
let pagesAsync = sites |> Seq.map fetchUrlAsync |> Async.Parallel |> Async.RunSynchronously
When the code is in use! resp = req.AsyncGetResponse(), the current thread is given up and its resource could be used for other purposes. If the response comes back in 1 second, then your thread could use this 1 second to process other stuff. Otherwise the thread is blocked, wasting thread resource for 1 second.
So even your are downloading 10000 web pages in parallel in an asynchronous way, the number of threads are limited to a small number.
I think you are not a .Net/C# programmer. The async tutorial usually assumes that one knows .Net and how to program asynchronous IO in C#(a lot of code). The magic of Async construct in F# is not for parallel. Because simple parallel could be realized by other constructs, e.g. ParallelFor in the .Net parallel extension. However, the asynchronous IO is more complex, as you see the thread gives up its execution, when the IO finishes, the IO needs to wake up its parent thread. This is where async magic is used for: in several lines of concise code, you can do very complex control.
Many good answers here but I thought I take a different angle to the question: How does F#'s async really work?
Unlike async/await in C# F# developers can actually implement their own version of Async. This can be a great way to learn how Async works.
(For the interested the source code to Async can be found here: https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/blob/fsharp4/src/fsharp/FSharp.Core/control.fs)
As our fundamental building block for our DIY workflows we define:
type DIY<'T> = ('T->unit)->unit
This is a function that accepts another function (called the continuation) that is called when the result of type 'T is ready. This allows DIY<'T> to start a background task without blocking the calling thread. When the result is ready the continuation is called allowing the computation to continue.
The F# Async building block is a bit more complicated as it also includes cancellation and exception continuations but essentially this is it.
In order to support the F# workflow syntax we need to define a computation expression (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233182.aspx). While this is a rather advanced F# feature it's also one of the most amazing features of F#. The two most important operations to define are return & bind which are used by F# to combine our DIY<_> building blocks into aggregated DIY<_> building blocks.
adaptTask is used to adapt a Task<'T> into a DIY<'T>.
startChild allows starting several simulatenous DIY<'T>, note that it doesn't start new threads in order to do so but reuses the calling thread.
Without any further ado here's the sample program:
open System
open System.Diagnostics
open System.Threading
open System.Threading.Tasks
// Our Do It Yourself Async workflow is a function accepting a continuation ('T->unit).
// The continuation is called when the result of the workflow is ready.
// This may happen immediately or after awhile, the important thing is that
// we don't block the calling thread which may then continue executing useful code.
type DIY<'T> = ('T->unit)->unit
// In order to support let!, do! and so on we implement a computation expression.
// The two most important operations are returnValue/bind but delay is also generally
// good to implement.
module DIY =
// returnValue is called when devs uses return x in a workflow.
// returnValue passed v immediately to the continuation.
let returnValue (v : 'T) : DIY<'T> =
fun a ->
a v
// bind is called when devs uses let!/do! x in a workflow
// bind binds two DIY workflows together
let bind (t : DIY<'T>) (fu : 'T->DIY<'U>) : DIY<'U> =
fun a ->
let aa tv =
let u = fu tv
u a
t aa
let delay (ft : unit->DIY<'T>) : DIY<'T> =
fun a ->
let t = ft ()
t a
// starts a DIY workflow as a subflow
// The way it works is that the workflow is executed
// which may be a delayed operation. But startChild
// should always complete immediately so in order to
// have something to return it returns a DIY workflow
// postProcess checks if the child has computed a value
// ie rv has some value and if we have computation ready
// to receive the value (rca has some value).
// If this is true invoke ca with v
let startChild (t : DIY<'T>) : DIY<DIY<'T>> =
fun a ->
let l = obj()
let rv = ref None
let rca = ref None
let postProcess () =
match !rv, !rca with
| Some v, Some ca ->
ca v
rv := None
rca := None
| _ , _ -> ()
let receiver v =
lock l <| fun () ->
rv := Some v
postProcess ()
t receiver
let child : DIY<'T> =
fun ca ->
lock l <| fun () ->
rca := Some ca
postProcess ()
a child
let runWithContinuation (t : DIY<'T>) (f : 'T -> unit) : unit =
t f
// Adapts a task as a DIY workflow
let adaptTask (t : Task<'T>) : DIY<'T> =
fun a ->
let action = Action<Task<'T>> (fun t -> a t.Result)
ignore <| t.ContinueWith action
// Because C# generics doesn't allow Task<void> we need to have
// a special overload of for the unit Task.
let adaptUnitTask (t : Task) : DIY<unit> =
fun a ->
let action = Action<Task> (fun t -> a ())
ignore <| t.ContinueWith action
type DIYBuilder() =
member x.Return(v) = returnValue v
member x.Bind(t,fu) = bind t fu
member x.Delay(ft) = delay ft
let diy = DIY.DIYBuilder()
open DIY
[<EntryPoint>]
let main argv =
let delay (ms : int) = adaptUnitTask <| Task.Delay ms
let delayedValue ms v =
diy {
do! delay ms
return v
}
let complete =
diy {
let sw = Stopwatch ()
sw.Start ()
// Since we are executing these tasks concurrently
// the time this takes should be roughly 700ms
let! cd1 = startChild <| delayedValue 100 1
let! cd2 = startChild <| delayedValue 300 2
let! cd3 = startChild <| delayedValue 700 3
let! d1 = cd1
let! d2 = cd2
let! d3 = cd3
sw.Stop ()
return sw.ElapsedMilliseconds,d1,d2,d3
}
printfn "Starting workflow"
runWithContinuation complete (printfn "Result is: %A")
printfn "Waiting for key"
ignore <| Console.ReadKey ()
0
The output of the program should be something like this:
Starting workflow
Waiting for key
Result is: (706L, 1, 2, 3)
When running the program note that Waiting for key is printed immidiately as the Console thread is not blocked from starting workflow. After about 700ms the result is printed.
I hope this was interesting to some F# devs
Lots of great detail in the other answers, but as I beginner I got tripped up by the differences between C# and F#.
F# async blocks are a recipe for how the code should run, not actually an instruction to run it yet.
You build up your recipe, maybe combining with other recipes (e.g. Async.Parallel). Only then do you ask the system to run it, and you can do that on the current thread (e.g. Async.StartImmediate) or on a new task, or various other ways.
So it's a decoupling of what you want to do from who should do it.
The C# model is often called 'Hot Tasks' because the tasks are started for you as part of their definition, vs. the F# 'Cold Task' models.
The idea behind let! and Async.RunSynchronously is that sometimes you have an asynchronous activity that you need the results of before you can continue. For example, the "download a web page" function may not have a synchronous equivalent, so you need some way to run it synchronously. Or if you have an Async.Parallel, you may have hundreds of tasks all happening concurrently, but you want them all to complete before continuing.
As far as I can tell, the reason you would use Async.StartImmediate is that you have some computation that you need to run on the current thread (perhaps a UI thread) without blocking it. Does it use coroutines? I guess you could call it that, although there isn't a general coroutine mechanism in .Net.
So why does Async.Parallel require a sequence of Async<'T>? Probably because it's a way of composing Async<'T> objects. You could easily create your own abstraction that works with just plain functions (or a combination of plain functions and Asyncs, but it would just be a convenience function.
In an async block you can have some synchronous and some async operations, so, for example, you may have a web site that will show the status of the user in several ways, so you may show if they have bills that are due shortly, birthdays coming up and homework due. None of these are in the same database, so your application will make three separate calls. You may want to make the calls in parallel, so that when the slowest one is done, you can put the results together and display it, so, the end result will be that the display is based on the slowest. You don't care about the order that these come back, you just want to know when all three are received.
To finish my example, you may then want to synchronously do the work to create the UI to show this information. So, at the end, you wanted this data fetched and the UI displayed, the parts where order doesn't matter is done in parallel, and where order matters can be done in a synchronous fashion.
You can do these as three threads, but then you have to keep track and unpause the original thread when the third one is finished, but it is more work, it is easier to have the .NET framework take care of this.
When crawling on webpages I need to be careful as to not make too many requests to the same domain, for example I want to put 1 s between requests. From what I understand it is the time between requests that is important. So to speed things up I want to use async workflows in F#, the idea being make your requests with 1 sec interval but avoid blocking things while waiting for request response.
let getHtmlPrimitiveAsyncTimer (uri : System.Uri) (timer:int) =
async{
let req = (WebRequest.Create(uri)) :?> HttpWebRequest
req.UserAgent<-"Mozilla"
try
Thread.Sleep(timer)
let! resp = (req.AsyncGetResponse())
Console.WriteLine(uri.AbsoluteUri+" got response")
use stream = resp.GetResponseStream()
use reader = new StreamReader(stream)
let html = reader.ReadToEnd()
return html
with
| _ as ex -> return "Bad Link"
}
Then I do something like:
let uri1 = System.Uri "http://rue89.com"
let timer = 1000
let jobs = [|for i in 1..10 -> getHtmlPrimitiveAsyncTimer uri1 timer|]
jobs
|> Array.mapi(fun i job -> Console.WriteLine("Starting job "+string i)
Async.StartAsTask(job).Result)
Is this alright ? I am very unsure about 2 things:
-Does the Thread.Sleep thing work for delaying the request ?
-Is using StartTask a problem ?
I am a beginner (as you may have noticed) in F# (coding in general actually ), and everything envolving Threads scares me :)
Thanks !!
I think what you want to do is
- create 10 jobs, numbered 'n', each starting 'n' seconds from now
- run those all in parallel
Approximately like
let makeAsync uri n = async {
// create the request
do! Async.Sleep(n * 1000)
// AsyncGetResponse etc
}
let a = [| for i in 1..10 -> makeAsync uri i |]
let results = a |> Async.Parallel |> Async.RunSynchronously
Note that of course they all won't start exactly now, if e.g. you have a 4-core machine, 4 will start running very soon, but then quickly execute up to the Async.Sleep, at which point the next 4 will run up until their sleeps, and so forth. And then in one second the first async wakes up and posts a request, and another second later the 2nd async wakes up, ... so this should work. The 1s is only approximate, since they're starting their timers each a very tiny bit staggered from one another... you may want to buffer it a little, e.g. 1100 ms or something if the cut-off you need is really exactly a second (network latencies and whatnot still leave a bit of this outside the possible control of your program probably).
Thread.Sleep is suboptimal, it will work ok for a small number of requests, but you're burning a thread, and threads are expensive and it won't scale to a large number.
You don't need StartAsTask unless you want to interoperate with .NET Tasks or later do a blocking rendezvous with the result via .Result. If you just want these to all run and then block to collect all the results in an array, Async.Parallel will do that fork-join parallelism for you just fine. If they're just going to print results, you can fire-and-forget via Async.Start which will drop the results on the floor.
(An alternative strategy is to use an agent as a throttle. Post all the http requests to a single agent, where the agent is logically single-threaded and sits in a loop, doing Async.Sleep for 1s, and then handling the next request. That's a nice way to make a general-purpose throttle... may be blog-worthy for me, come to think of it.)