bevy/crates/bevy_tasks
Mike d22d310ad5 Nested spawns on scope (#4466)
# Objective

- Add ability to create nested spawns. This is needed for stageless. The current executor spawns tasks for each system early and runs the system by communicating through a channel. In stageless we want to spawn the task late, so that archetypes can be updated right before the task is run. The executor is run on a separate task, so this enables the scope to be passed to the spawned executor.
- Fixes #4301

## Solution

- Instantiate a single threaded executor on the scope and use that instead of the LocalExecutor. This allows the scope to be Send, but still able to spawn tasks onto the main thread the scope is run on. This works because while systems can access nonsend data. The systems themselves are Send. Because of this change we lose the ability to spawn nonsend tasks on the scope, but I don't think this is being used anywhere. Users would still be able to use spawn_local on TaskPools.
- Steals the lifetime tricks the `std:🧵:scope` uses to allow nested spawns, but disallow scope to be passed to tasks or threads not associated with the scope.
- Change the storage for the tasks to a `ConcurrentQueue`. This is to allow a &Scope to be passed for spawning instead of a &mut Scope. `ConcurrentQueue` was chosen because it was already in our dependency tree because `async_executor` depends on it.
- removed the optimizations for 0 and 1 spawned tasks. It did improve those cases, but made the cases of more than 1 task slower.
---

## Changelog

Add ability to nest spawns

```rust
fn main() {
    let pool = TaskPool::new();
    pool.scope(|scope| {
        scope.spawn(async move {
            // calling scope.spawn from an spawn task was not possible before
            scope.spawn(async move {
                // do something
            });
        });
    })
}
```

## Migration Guide

If you were using explicit lifetimes and Passing Scope you'll need to specify two lifetimes now.

```rust
fn scoped_function<'scope>(scope: &mut Scope<'scope, ()>) {}
// should become
fn scoped_function<'scope>(scope: &Scope<'_, 'scope, ()>) {}
```

`scope.spawn_local` changed to `scope.spawn_on_scope` this should cover cases where you needed to run tasks on the local thread, but does not cover spawning Nonsend Futures.

## TODO
* [x] think real hard about all the lifetimes
* [x] add doc about what 'env and 'scope mean.
* [x] manually check that the single threaded task pool still works
* [x] Get updated perf numbers
* [x] check and make sure all the transmutes are necessary
* [x] move commented out test into a compile fail test
* [x] look through the tests for scope on std and see if I should add any more tests

Co-authored-by: Michael Hsu <myhsu@benjaminelectric.com>
Co-authored-by: Carter Anderson <mcanders1@gmail.com>
2022-09-28 01:59:10 +00:00
..
examples small and mostly pointless refactoring (#2934) 2022-02-13 22:33:55 +00:00
src Nested spawns on scope (#4466) 2022-09-28 01:59:10 +00:00
Cargo.toml Nested spawns on scope (#4466) 2022-09-28 01:59:10 +00:00
README.md Cleanup of Markdown Files and add CI Checking (#1463) 2021-02-22 04:50:05 +00:00

bevy_tasks

A refreshingly simple task executor for bevy. :)

This is a simple threadpool with minimal dependencies. The main usecase is a scoped fork-join, i.e. spawning tasks from a single thread and having that thread await the completion of those tasks. This is intended specifically for bevy as a lighter alternative to rayon for this specific usecase. There are also utilities for generating the tasks from a slice of data. This library is intended for games and makes no attempt to ensure fairness or ordering of spawned tasks.

It is based on async-executor, a lightweight executor that allows the end user to manage their own threads. async-executor is based on async-task, a core piece of async-std.

Dependencies

A very small dependency list is a key feature of this module

├── async-executor
│   ├── async-task
│   ├── concurrent-queue
│   │   └── cache-padded
│   └── fastrand
├── num_cpus
│   └── libc
├── parking
└── futures-lite