(CW: morning post driven by idle shower musings before coffee has really had a chance to kick in)
There are lots of cases where a value might not yet be known, and will take some time to produce, but once it is it can be cached and returned immediately.
So in async code, the obvious thing is to have a future that resolves to the value, and implement an internal cache that can avoid some of the time-consuming work and resolve sooner. Consumers can .and_then()
chain this future (or await!
the value) and let the hidden cache take care of the details. Simple and elegant.
However, futures do no work unless polled, and thus at least as far as I understand it, this pattern (probably?) involves a bunch of deferral and another trip around the event loop, possible preemption, and other overheads just to have a future that resolves immediately.
The alternative that I can see is to have the caller cache the value, and check to see whether the result is available or the async code path needs to be taken. That can work fine, but implies a certain code structure that might not always fit. Extra layers of encapsulation can hide detail, but can't really hide whether or not there's an async result being fetched, at least not without blocking.
Have I got this wrong? Is there a way for a future / await! block to return in an immediately-resolved state, or some other way to optimise a pattern like this?