Pantry

The Pantry is useful for temporarily storing for later use values that might "decay" (become unusable) over time, such as:

• network connections kept alive for later reuse if the peer doesn't close their end
• files which may be deleted from the filesystem by the user or other programs
• "weak references" to resources which may be released at any point by other actors

More information can be found in the crate documentation.

Usage

Create a Pantry value and use its store function to store values for later use. A key is provided along with the value, so that the value can be retrieved later using the same key. A worker thread is spawned which monitors the values and automatically drops any which have "decayed". Values must implement the Perishable trait, whose perished function asynchronously completes once the value has decayed.

Use the fetch asynchronous function on the Pantry with a key to retrieve a value previously stored using that key. A value is only returned if it was stored using the same key and has not decayed since it was stored.

Multiple values may have the same key, with the caveat that the values stored under a given key may not be returned in the same order in which they were stored.