need

I run a web service that processes users' Twitter timelines as tweets arrive. If multiple users subscribe to the same person, I used to naively process all of those tweets separately. With need, only the first user's thread processes the tweets; the others simply await the result.

func ProcessTweet(tweetId int64) {
	s := need.NewServer()
	key := fmt.Sprintf("tweet-%d", tweetId)
	value, err := s.Need(key, func(string) (interface{}, error) {
		return expensiveProcessing(tweetId)
	})
	if err == nil {
		if s, ok := value.(string); ok {
			fmt.Printf("result: %s\n", s)
		}
	}
}

How it works

If multiple Needs arrive simultaneously with the same key, the callback for the first is called and its return value is passed to all the other callers.

If a callback returns an error, the next callback is tried. (The first caller gets the error.)

By default, need has no memory. If other requests for a key arrive after the original request completes, the new callback will be called to provide the value. You can give need a memory by supplying a MemoryProvider (uses an in-memory map) or RedisProvider (uses redis, though it panics for return values that aren't strings).

What it doesn't do (TODO)

RedisProvider should work with more than just strings. It should make some effort to marshal values if you want it to.

If you use RedisProvider (or any provider that works with multiple processes), you ought to be able to pool requests across them as well. Currently, need doesn't offer a rich enough API to providers to do that.