Fixing exception safety in our task_sequencer -- Raymond Chen

Some time ago, we developed a task_sequencer class for running asynchronous operations in sequence. There’s a problem with the implementation of Queue­Task­Async: What happens if an exception occurs?

Fixing Exception Safety in our task_sequencer

by Raymond Chen

From the article:

Let’s look at the various places an exception can occur in Queue­Task­Async.

    template<typename Maker>
    auto QueueTaskAsync(Maker&& maker) ->decltype(maker())
    {
        auto current = std::make_shared<chained_task>();
        auto previous = [&]
        {
            winrt::slim_lock_guard guard(m_mutex);
            return std::exchange(m_latest, current); ← oops
        }();

        suspender suspend;

        using Async = decltype(maker());
        auto task = [](auto&& current, auto&& makerParam,
                       auto&& contextParam, auto& suspend)
                    -> Async
        {
            completer completer{ std::move(current) };
            auto maker = std::move(makerParam);
            auto context = std::move(contextParam);

            co_await suspend;
            co_await context;
            co_return co_await maker();
        }(current, std::forward<Maker>(maker),
          winrt::apartment_context(), suspend);

        previous->continue_with(suspend.handle);

        return task;
    }

If an exception occurs at make_shared, then no harm is done because we haven’t done anything yet.

If an exception occurs when starting the lambda task, then we are in trouble. We have already linked the current onto m_latest, but we will never call continue_with(), so the chain of tasks stops making progress.

To fix this, we need to delay hooking up the current to the chain of chained_tasks until we are sure that we have a task to chain. 

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