This is the first of several posts describing the evolution of scala.concurrent.Future in Scala 2.12.x.

Missing canonical combinators: flatten

Are you one of us Future-users who have grown tired of the old flatMap(identity) boilerplate for un-nesting Futures as in:

val future: Future[Future[X]] = ???
val flattenedFuture /*: Future[X] */ = future.flatMap(identity)

Then I have some great news for you! Starting with Scala 2.12 scala.concurrent.Future will have a flatten-method with the following signature:

def flatten[S](implicit ev: T <:< Future[S]): Future[S]

Allowing you to write:

val future: Future[Future[X]] = ???
val flattenedFuture /*: Future[X] */ = future.flatten

Benefits:

1. Less to type
2. Less to read
3. Does not require any ExecutionContext

Bonus: Doesn’t allocate a function instance as flatMap(identity) does:

scala> def sameInstance[T](first: T => T, second: T => T) = first eq second
sameInstance: [T](first: T => T, second: T => T)Boolean

scala> sameInstance[Int](identity, identity)
res0: Boolean = false

Click here for the next part in this blog series.

Cheers,
√