(Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDaKLQE03ss)
The most complicated state in an application is time. Like cooking a bag of microwave popcorn, modern web applications desperately try to keep up with their state through an orchestrated chaos of asynchronous operations popping off in indeterminate cadence. No question, coordinating all this concurrency is hard.
But there's a pitfall at the heart of asynchrony that stays mostly unaddressed.
When an operation doesn't finish right away, synchronously, it's possible the operation may never finish. Or, it may be destined to finish eventually, but a second operation may be raised which means we no longer care about the first. Whatever the case, we need to be able to cancel it. This critical check ultimately protects users from the vagaries of unpredictable systems.
Cancellation should be core to our async programming; no asynchrony should run without it. Too often, such handling is just a corner case exception. Without a cancellation strategy, your applications are incomplete at best.
We'll discuss use-cases for async cancellation and various approaches to managing them.
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