Dotnet client async questions

[magkal]

Hey,
I've been looking at the compiled source code for the dotnet client, and there are some potential pitfalls in async calls not beeing awaited, like the websocket connection is created through System.Net.WebSockets.ClientWebSocket and that is connecting to the lightstreamer server with a call to ConnectAsync method.
But the lightstreamer library is making that call inside a constructor which as not async and bad practice it would be more reasonable to be used like this:

var ws = new WebSocket();
await ws.ConnectAsync();

See ref:
https://github.com/Lightstreamer/Lightstreamer-lib-client-haxe/blob/main/src/platform/cs/com/lightstreamer/internal/WsClient.hx#L38C10-L38C22

[acarioni]

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately Haxe, the language in which the client library is written before the transpilation to C#, doesn’t support async functions and so there are some rough edges when the compiled Haxe code is integrated with native C# libraries.

Apart from the bad code style, do you see any potential issues for safety, memory leaks etc.?

[magkal]

Oh ok,
The risk here mainly lies in lost exceptions and dead locks and weird side effects, since the calling object won't know if the async process ever finished or in what state it's in.
It shouldn't affect memory leaks as long as aync fired code is handling e.g. IDisposable correctly.

Since the nature of the websocket listener is a very long running "background" process, it might work in most if not all cases, however there could be hard to fix/find issues related to the call(s) not being awaited. It would be worse if e.g. a regular http call is not awaited since you likely want to process the response of that call in a safe deterministic manner.

[acarioni]

Thanks for the advice. We'll try to improve this aspect of the .NET library in the next releases.