...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
This tutorial program demonstrates how to use asio's asynchronous functionality by modifying the program from tutorial Timer.1 to perform an asynchronous wait on the timer.
#include <iostream> #include <boost/asio.hpp>
Using asio's asynchronous functionality means supplying a completion
token, which determines how the result will be delivered to a completion handler when an asynchronous
operation completes. In this program we define a function called
print
to be called when the
asynchronous wait finishes.
void print(const boost::system::error_code& /*e*/) { std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl; } int main() { boost::asio::io_context io; boost::asio::steady_timer t(io, boost::asio::chrono::seconds(5));
Next, instead of doing a blocking wait as in tutorial Timer.1, we call the
steady_timer::async_wait()
function to perform an asynchronous wait. When calling this function we pass
the print
function that was
defined above.
t.async_wait(&print);
Finally, we must call the boost::asio::io_context::run() member function on the io_context object.
The asio library provides a guarantee that completion handlers will only be called from threads that are currently calling boost::asio::io_context::run(). Therefore unless the boost::asio::io_context::run() function is called the completion handler for the asynchronous wait completion will never be invoked.
The boost::asio::io_context::run() function will also continue to run while there is still "work" to do. In this example, the work is the asynchronous wait on the timer, so the call will not return until the timer has expired and the completion handler has returned.
It is important to remember to give the io_context some work to do before calling boost::asio::io_context::run(). For example, if we had omitted the above call to steady_timer::async_wait(), the io_context would not have had any work to do, and consequently boost::asio::io_context::run() would have returned immediately.
io.run(); return 0; }
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