Question

Trying to understand the new async/await pattern, I have one question which I can’t find an answer to, namely if I should decorate my methods with async, if I intend to call those methods from other async functions, or just return Tasks where appropriate?

In other words, which of these classes A, B or C is best, and why?

class A<T>
{
      public async Task<T> foo1() //Should be consumed
      {
          return await foo2();
      }

      public async Task<T> foo2() //Could be consumed
      {
          return await foo3();
      }

      private async Task<T> foo3() //Private
      {
          return await Task.Run(...);
      }
}

class B<T>
{
      public async Task<T> foo1() //Should be consumed
      {
          return await foo2();
      }

      public async Task<T> foo2() //Could be consumed
      {
          return await foo3();
      }

      private Task<T> foo3() //Private
      {
          return Task.Run(...);
      }
}

class C<T>
{
      public async Task<T> foo1() //Should be consumed
      {
          return await foo2();
      }

      public Task<T> foo2() //Could be consumed
      {
          return foo3();
      }

      private Task<T> foo3() //Private
      {
          return Task.Run(...);
      }
}

It seems redundant to overdecorate methods so I naturally lean toward C, but at the same time it feels somewhat awkward to work with Task<T> unless you use the await keyword.

Answer 1

Both versions work effectively the same, the only difference is that when you use await here, you get some performance penalty (because the state machine must be set up and a continuation will most likely be used).

So, it comes down to a tradeoff: Do you want your methods to be somewhat more efficient at the cost of being slightly less readable? Or are you willing to sacrifice performance for readability?

Usually, I would advise you to go for readability first and only focus on performance if profiling tells you it’s worth it. But in this case, I think the increase in readability is small, so I would probably not use await.

Also note that your class C still doesn’t go far enough: foo1() also doesn’t need await.