Structured Concurrency: Taming the Threads

Structured concurrency is a paradigm that treats multiple concurrent tasks running in different threads as a single unit of work. This simplifies error handling, cancellation, and observability.

Key Concepts

• Scopes: Tasks are launched within a defined scope. When the scope completes, all tasks within it are guaranteed to be finished.
• Error Propagation: If a child task fails, the error is propagated up the tree, potentially cancelling siblings.
• Task Hierarchy: Creates a clear parent-child relationship between tasks.

Benefits

By preventing "dangling threads" (threads that continue running even after the request that spawned them has failed or completed), structured concurrency ensures that resources are always cleaned up properly. It brings the clarity of single-threaded control flow to concurrent programming.