Why am I being told my fire_and_forget coroutine is not returning a value?

Raymond Chen

February 1st, 20213 0

You’re writing a C++/WinRT coroutine that nominally returns a fire_and_forget, meaning that the coroutine runs without notifying anybody when it is finished.

fire_and_forget DoSomething()
{ 
    DoFirstThing();
    DoSecondThing();
}

And when you compile this, you get

error C4716: 'DoSomething': must return a value

A fire_and_forget coroutine doesn’t have a return value, since there is nobody awaiting it. So what’s going on here?

What’s going on is that the body of your fire_and_forget coroutine doesn’t contain any co_await or co_return statements. A function must contain at least one co_await or co_return statement in order to be considered a coroutine. Since the function did neither of those things, the C++ language treats it not as a coroutine but a regular function.

A regular function that needs to return a fire_and_forget object, and you didn’t do that.

You have a few options for fixing this.

One option is to add a co_return; statement at the end. Normally, falling off the end of a coroutine is equivalent to performing a co_return;, but in this case, you need to say co_return explicitly in order to make sure you have a coroutine at all!

Another option is to change your function to return void. After all, it doesn’t contain any asynchronous operations, so the whole thing ran synchronously anyway. It never needed to be a coroutine in the first place.

Raymond Chen