Coroutine


Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes.
According to Donald Knuth, Melvin Conway coined the term coroutine in 1958 when he applied it to construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963.

Comparison with subroutines

Subroutines are special cases of coroutines. When subroutines are invoked, execution begins at the start, and once a subroutine exits, it is finished; an instance of a subroutine only returns once, and does not hold state between invocations. By contrast, coroutines can exit by calling other coroutines, which may later return to the point where they were invoked in the original coroutine; from the coroutine's point of view, it is not exiting but calling another coroutine. Thus, a coroutine instance holds state, and varies between invocations; there can be multiple instances of a given coroutine at once. The difference between calling another coroutine by means of "yielding" to it and simply calling another routine, is that the relationship between two coroutines which yield to each other is not that of caller-callee, but instead symmetric.
Any subroutine can be translated to a coroutine which does not call yield.
Here is a simple example of how coroutines can be useful. Suppose you have a consumer-producer relationship where one routine creates items and adds them to a queue and another removes items from the queue and uses them. For reasons of efficiency, you want to add and remove several items at once. The code might look like this:
var q := new queue
coroutine produce
loop
while q is not full
create some new items
add the items to q
yield to consume
coroutine consume
loop
while q is not empty
remove some items from q
use the items
yield to produce
The queue is then completely filled or emptied before yielding control to the other coroutine using the yield command. The further coroutines calls are starting right after the yield, in the outer coroutine loop.
Although this example is often used as an introduction to multithreading, two threads are not needed for this: the yield statement can be implemented by a jump directly from one routine into the other.

Comparison with threads

Coroutines are very similar to threads. However, coroutines are cooperatively multitasked, whereas threads are typically preemptively multitasked. This means that coroutines provide concurrency but not parallelism. The advantages of coroutines over threads are that they may be used in a hard-realtime context, there is no need for synchronisation primitives such as mutexes, semaphores, etc. in order to guard critical sections, and there is no need for support from the operating system.
It is possible to implement coroutines using preemptively-scheduled threads, in a way that will be transparent to the calling code, but some of the advantages will be lost.

Comparison with generators

, also known as semicoroutines, are a subset of coroutines. Specifically, while both can yield multiple times, suspending their execution and allowing re-entry at multiple entry points, they differ in coroutines' ability to control where execution continues immediately after they yield, while generators cannot, instead transferring control back to the generator's caller. That is, since generators are primarily used to simplify the writing of iterators, the yield statement in a generator does not specify a coroutine to jump to, but rather passes a value back to a parent routine.
However, it is still possible to implement coroutines on top of a generator facility, with the aid of a top-level dispatcher routine that passes control explicitly to child generators identified by tokens passed back from the generators:
var q := new queue
generator produce
loop
while q is not full
create some new items
add the items to q
yield consume
generator consume
loop
while q is not empty
remove some items from q
use the items
yield produce
subroutine dispatcher
var d := new dictionary
d := start produce
d := start consume
var current := produce
loop
current := next d
A number of implementations of coroutines for languages with generator support but no native coroutines use this or a similar model.

Comparison with mutual recursion

Using coroutines for state machines or concurrency is similar to using mutual recursion with tail calls, as in both cases the control changes to a different one of a set of routines. However, coroutines are more flexible and generally more efficient. Since coroutines yield rather than return, and then resume execution rather than restarting from the beginning, they are able to hold state, both variables and execution point, and yields are not limited to being in tail position; mutually recursive subroutines must either use shared variables or pass state as parameters. Further, each mutually recursive call of a subroutine requires a new stack frame, while passing control between coroutines uses the existing contexts and can be implemented simply by a jump.

Common uses

Coroutines are useful to implement the following:
Coroutines originated as an assembly language method, but are supported in some high-level programming languages. Early examples include Simula, Smalltalk, and Modula-2. More recent examples are Ruby, Lua, Julia, and Go.
Since continuations can be used to implement coroutines, programming languages that support them can also quite easily support coroutines.

Implementations

, many of the most popular programming languages, including C and its derivatives, do not have direct support for coroutines within the language or their standard libraries. An exception is the C++ library , part of , which supports context swapping on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC and x86 on POSIX, Mac OS X and Windows. Coroutines can be built upon Boost.Context.
In situations where a coroutine would be the natural implementation of a mechanism, but is not available, the typical response is to use a closurea subroutine with state variables to maintain an internal state between calls, and to transfer control to the correct point. Conditionals within the code result in the execution of different code paths on successive calls, based on the values of the state variables. Another typical response is to implement an explicit state machine in the form of a large and complex switch statement or via a goto statement, particularly a computed goto. Such implementations are considered difficult to understand and maintain, and a motivation for coroutine support.
Threads, and to a lesser extent fibers, are an alternative to coroutines in mainstream programming environments today. Threads provide facilities for managing the realtime cooperative interaction of simultaneously executing pieces of code. Threads are widely available in environments that support C, are familiar to many programmers, and are usually well-implemented, well-documented and well-supported. However, as they solve a large and difficult problem they include many powerful and complex facilities and have a correspondingly difficult learning curve. As such, when a coroutine is all that is needed, using a thread can be overkill.
One important difference between threads and coroutines is that threads are typically preemptively scheduled while coroutines are not. Because threads can be rescheduled at any instant and can execute concurrently, programs using threads must be careful about locking. In contrast, because coroutines can only be rescheduled at specific points in the program and do not execute concurrently, programs using coroutines can often avoid locking entirely.
Since fibers are cooperatively scheduled, they provide an ideal base for implementing coroutines above. However, system support for fibers is often lacking compared to that for threads.

Implementations for C

In order to implement general-purpose coroutines, a second call stack must be obtained, which is a feature not directly supported by the C language. A reliable way to achieve this is to use a small amount of inline assembly to explicitly manipulate the stack pointer during initial creation of the coroutine. This is the approach recommended by Tom Duff in a discussion on its relative merits vs. the method used by Protothreads. On platforms which provide the POSIX sigaltstack system call, a second call stack can be obtained by calling a springboard function from within a signal handler to achieve the same goal in portable C, at the cost of some extra complexity. C libraries complying to POSIX or the Single Unix Specification provided such routines as getcontext, setcontext, makecontext and swapcontext, but these functions were declared obsolete in POSIX 1.2008.
Once a second call stack has been obtained with one of the methods listed above, the setjmp and longjmp functions in the standard C library can then be used to implement the switches between coroutines. These functions save and restore, respectively, the stack pointer, program counter, callee-saved registers, and any other internal state as required by the ABI, such that returning to a coroutine after having yielded restores all the state that would be restored upon returning from a function call. Minimalist implementations, which do not piggyback off the setjmp and longjmp functions, may achieve the same result via a small block of inline assembly which swaps merely the stack pointer and program counter, and clobbers all other registers. This can be significantly faster, as setjmp and longjmp must conservatively store all registers which may be in use according to the ABI, whereas the clobber method allows the compiler to store only what it knows is actually in use.
Due to the lack of direct language support, many authors have written their own libraries for coroutines which hide the above details. Russ Cox's libtask library is a good example of this genre. It uses the context functions if they are provided by the native C library; otherwise it provides its own implementations for ARM, PowerPC, Sparc, and x86. Other notable implementations include libpcl, coro, lthread, libCoroutine, libconcurrency, libcoro, ribs2, libdill., libaco, and libco.
In addition to the general approach above, several attempts have been made to approximate coroutines in C with combinations of subroutines and macros. Simon Tatham's contribution, based on Duff's device, is a notable example of the genre, and is the basis for Protothreads and similar implementations. In addition to Duff's objections, Tatham's own comments provide a frank evaluation of the limitations of this approach: "As far as I know, this is the worst piece of C hackery ever seen in serious production code." The main shortcomings of this approximation are that, in not maintaining a separate stack frame for each coroutine, local variables are not preserved across yields from the function, it is not possible to have multiple entries to the function, and control can only be yielded from the top-level routine.

Implementations for C++

C# 5.0 includes await syntax support.

Implementations for Clojure

is a third-party library providing support for stackless coroutines in Clojure. It's implemented as a macro, statically splitting an arbitrary code block on arbitrary var calls and emitting the coroutine as a stateful function.

Implementations for D

implements coroutines as its standard library class A generator makes it trivial to expose a fiber function as an input range, making any fiber compatible with existing range algorithms.

Implementations for Java

There are several implementations for coroutines in Java. Despite the constraints imposed by Java's abstractions, the JVM does not preclude the possibility. There are four general methods used, but two break bytecode portability among standards-compliant JVMs.
*
implements coroutines as part of a .

Implementation in Mono

The Mono Common Language Runtime has support for continuations, from which coroutines can be built.

Implementation in the .NET Framework as fibers

During the development of the.NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft extended the design of the Common Language Runtime hosting APIs to handle fiber-based scheduling with an eye towards its use in fiber-mode for SQL server. Before release, support for the task switching hook ICLRTask::SwitchOut was removed due to time constraints.
Consequently, the use of the fiber API to switch tasks is currently not a viable option in the.NET Framework.

Implementations for Perl

Coroutines are natively implemented in all Raku backends.

Implementations for PHP

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There is a library for Rust that provides coroutines.
Generators are an experimental feature available in nightly rust that provides an implementation of coroutines with async/await.

Implementations for Scala

Scala Coroutines is a coroutine implementation for Scala. This implementation is a library-level extension that relies on the Scala macro system to statically transform sections of the program into coroutine objects. As such, this implementation does not require modifications in the JVM, so it is fully portable between different JVMs and works with alternative Scala backends, such as Scala.js, which compiles to JavaScript.
Scala Coroutines rely on the coroutine macro that transforms a normal block of code into a coroutine definition. Such a coroutine definition can be invoked with the call operation, which instantiates a coroutine frame. A coroutine frame can be resumed with the resume method, which resumes the execution of the coroutine's body, until reaching a yieldval keyword, which suspends the coroutine frame. Scala Coroutines also expose a snapshot method, which effectively duplicates the coroutine. A detailed descriptions of Scala coroutines with snapshots appeared at , along with their .

Implementations for Scheme

Since Scheme provides full support for continuations, implementing coroutines is nearly trivial, requiring only that a queue of continuations be maintained.

Implementations for Smalltalk

Since, in most Smalltalk environments, the execution stack is a first-class citizen, coroutines can be implemented without additional library or VM support.

Implementations for Swift

Since version 8.6, the Tool Command Language supports coroutines in the core language.

Implementations for Vala

implements native support for coroutines. They are designed to be used with a Gtk Main Loop, but can be used alone if care is taken to ensure that the end callback will never have to be called before doing, at least, one yield.

Implementations in assembly languages

Machine-dependent assembly languages often provide direct methods for coroutine execution. For example, in MACRO-11, the assembly language of the PDP-11 family of minicomputers, the “classic” coroutine switch is effected by the instruction "JSR PC,@+", which jumps to the address popped from the stack and pushes the current instruction address onto the stack. On VAXen the comparable instruction is "JSB @+". Even on a Motorola 6809 there is the instruction "JSR "; note the "++", as 2 bytes are popped from the stack. This instruction is much used in the 'monitor' Assist 09.