Returning futures::stream::Then from a function

help
1

I'm trying to write a function that takes a &self (of the struct it's for) and returns a futures::stream::Then. I've omitted the type parameters of Then - any working example here would help me understand what's going on.

A preliminary question - is this a reasonable thing to return?/is there a better return type? I haven't been able to find any questions/examples online about returning the stream wrapper types, so maybe I'm just trying to do something really unusual. I need this function to do some async processing on a list of items, so I'm converting the list to a stream, passing in an async closure, and returning the Then result. I want to call this function on several different inputs, then merge all the streams.

Assuming that's valid...how do I write the function signature? I've tried variations of:

  • impl Stream. But the compiler gives me a lifetime error, where the &self parameter is required to be static. As far as I can tell, this is because the stream could be run at any time (because it's async), so self would also need to live that long? Is there a way to tell the compiler that I will await this stream to completion before self dies?
  • Then<...>. But for the life of me I cannot get the compiler to be happy with the third generic type parameter, which is the type of the closure.
2

Will something like this work?

fn then<'a>(&'a self, ...) -> impl Stream + 'a

This way, you'll explicitly tie the Stream's lifetime to the self's one. If I understand correctly, by default it is the following:

fn then(&'_ self, ...) -> impl Stream + 'static

i.e. self has some elided lifetime, but impl Trait without any further restrictions is 'static.

2 Likes
3

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. We invite you to open a new topic if you have further questions or comments.