Hanging Gets in Rust

When consuming an API with a hanging get, some care must be taken to avoid losing the reference to the pending FIDL request. Some futures combinators like Abortable and fuchsia_async::TimeoutExt will drop the pending future, which causes the reference to the FIDL request to be dropped too. Because hanging gets are usually implemented in a stateful manner by protocol servers, it may be invalid to call the hanging get method once a previous future on the same Proxy has been dropped.

To avoid invalidating the Proxy when using such combinators, a good pattern is to wrap the hanging get call in a stream by using HangingGetStream or using the pattern below. Dropping a Stream::next future is always safe because it will not cause the underlying FIDL request to be dropped.

fn hanging_get_stream(proxy: &FooProxy) -> impl futures::Stream<Item=Result<FooResult, fidl::Error>> + '_ {
    futures::stream::try_unfold(proxy, |proxy| {
       proxy.watch_foo().map_ok(move |watch_result| Some((watch_result, proxy)))
    })
}