Been reading the Hex docs but it’s still not very clear to me. I can see this Task.yield/2 is an alternative to await/2 where the caller will temporarily block, waiting until the task replies or crashes. If the result does not arrive within the timeout, it can be called again at a later moment. T…

It means that the caller process will wait (AKA be blocked) until: the task completed, or the timeout has passed. In this case you could call Task.yield again (this is ‘later’). So yes, it will not run in parallel during this time, which is exactly the point of this call: Waiting until a result i…

[image] Qqwy: the timeout has passed. In this case you could call Task.yield again (this is ‘later’). but what if for some reason it always time out? will I have an infinite loop if I call Task.yield every time there is a timeout?

Yes - so typically you would decrement a counter and take drastic action once it gets to 0. Task.await/2 : If the timeout is exceeded, then the current process will exit. If the task process is linked to the current process which is the case when a task is started with async, then the task process…

got it, so the only difference between await and yield is that with yield I can wait for the task to finish as much as I want (using a counter like you suggested to see how many times I want to retry after it has timed out) is that right?

Pretty much. You could also immediately issue Task.shutdown/2 for the runaway task, simply to keep your current process alive (an option which Task.await/2 doesn’t give you but given that the current process potentially provided faulty startup data to the task also terminating the current process m…

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Difference between Task.await and Task.yield

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nelson687 June 10, 2018, 7:55pm 7

excellent, makes sense now

thanks!