Overview

Futures, hinted at earlier in the guide, are the building block used to manage asynchronous logic. They are the underlying asynchronous abstraction used by Tokio.

A future is a value that represents the completion of an asynchronous computation. Usually, the future completes due to an event that happens elsewhere in the system. While we’ve been looking at things from the perspective of basic I/O, you can use a future to represent a wide range of events, e.g.:

• A database query, when the query finishes, the future is completed, and its value is the result of the query.

• An RPC invocation to a server. When the server replies, the future is completed, and its value is the server’s response.

• A timeout. When time is up, the future is completed, the value is an empty tuple () (also referred to as “unit” or “the unit type”).

• A long-running CPU-intensive task, running on a thread pool. When the task finishes, the future is completed, and its value is the return value of the task.

• Reading bytes from a socket. When the bytes are ready, the future is completed – and depending on the buffering strategy, the bytes might be returned directly, or written as a side-effect into some existing buffer.

Applications built with Tokio are structured in terms of futures. Tokio takes these futures and drives them to completion.