Boost C++ Libraries

But what about the case when we must wait for all results of different types?

We can present an API that is frankly quite cool. Consider a sample struct:

struct Data {
    std::string str;
    double      inexact;
    int         exact;

    friend std::ostream& operator<<( std::ostream& out, Data const& data);
    ...
};

Let's fill its members from task functions all running concurrently:

Data data = wait_all_members< Data >(
        [](){ return sleeper("wams_left", 100); },
        [](){ return sleeper(3.14,        150); },
        [](){ return sleeper(17,          50); });
std::cout << "wait_all_members<Data>(success) => " << data << std::endl;

Note that for this case, we abandon the notion of capturing the earliest result first, and so on: we must fill exactly the passed struct in left-to-right order.

That permits a beautifully simple implementation:

// Explicitly pass Result. This can be any type capable of being initialized
// from the results of the passed functions, such as a struct.
template< typename Result, typename ... Fns >
Result wait_all_members( Fns && ... functions) {
    // Run each of the passed functions on a separate fiber, passing all their
    // futures to helper function for processing.
    return wait_all_members_get< Result >(
            boost::fibers::async( std::forward< Fns >( functions) ) ... );
}

template< typename Result, typename ... Futures >
Result wait_all_members_get( Futures && ... futures) {
    // Fetch the results from the passed futures into Result's initializer
    // list. It's true that the get() calls here will block the implicit
    // iteration over futures -- but that doesn't matter because we won't be
    // done until the slowest of them finishes anyway. As results are
    // processed in argument-list order rather than order of completion, the
    // leftmost get() to throw an exception will cause that exception to
    // propagate to the caller.
    return Result{ futures.get() ... };
}

It is tempting to try to implement wait_all_members() as a one-liner like this:

return Result{ boost::fibers::async(functions).get()... };

The trouble with this tactic is that it would serialize all the task functions. The runtime makes a single pass through functions, calling fibers::async() for each and then immediately calling future::get() on its returned future<>. That blocks the implicit loop. The above is almost equivalent to writing:

return Result{ functions()... };

in which, of course, there is no concurrency at all.

Passing the argument pack through a function-call boundary (wait_all_members_get()) forces the runtime to make two passes: one in wait_all_members() to collect the future<>s from all the async() calls, the second in wait_all_members_get() to fetch each of the results.

As noted in comments, within the wait_all_members_get() parameter pack expansion pass, the blocking behavior of get() becomes irrelevant. Along the way, we will hit the get() for the slowest task function; after that every subsequent get() will complete in trivial time.

By the way, we could also use this same API to fill a vector or other collection:

// If we don't care about obtaining results as soon as they arrive, and we
// prefer a result vector in passed argument order rather than completion
// order, wait_all_members() is another possible implementation of
// wait_all_until_error().
auto strings = wait_all_members< std::vector< std::string > >(
        [](){ return sleeper("wamv_left",   150); },
        [](){ return sleeper("wamv_middle", 100); },
        [](){ return sleeper("wamv_right",   50); });
std::cout << "wait_all_members<vector>() =>";
for ( std::string const& str : strings) {
    std::cout << " '" << str << "'";
}
std::cout << std::endl;