Is it advantageous to use ConfigureAwait(false) in a library that directly returns a Task from a call to another library?

Question

Follow-up to this question. I have a library with many async methods that thinly wrap HttpClient. Effectively they just do some setup and directly return the Task returned from the HttpClient call:

public Task DoThingAsyc() {
    // do some setup
    return httpClient.DoThingAsync();
}

I'm pondering whether to add ConfigureAwait(false) to these calls. The prevailing wisdom seems to be "yes, always do that in libraries." But in this case, it would introduce some (perhaps negligible) overhead, because ConfigureAwait returns a ConfiguredTaskAwaitable which would need to be wrapped back into a Task in order to not change the method signature. Certainly not hard to code:

public async Task DoThingAsyc() {
    // do some setup
    return await httpClient.DoThingAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
}

My question is, will the efficiency benefits of ConfigureAwait(false) likely outweigh the extra overhead introduced in this case? What example above would be considered the better practice?

Answer 1

No, don't do this.

Since you're not using await, you're not supposed to configure for it in advance. It's the responsibility of the caller of your library to do the ConfigureAwait call. And the caller may well want to call ConfigureAwait(true) instead of ConfigureAwait(false) - you don't know that.

Calling ConfigureAwait(false) in library code is best practice only when you await on it in the library.

In most cases, code like this:

async Task<Something> DoSomethingAsync()
{
    return await DoSomethingElseAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
}

Is equivalent to:

Task<Something> DoSomethingAsync()
{
    return DoSomethingElseAsync();
}

if DoSomethingElseAsync respects the Task contract (for instance, if it returns a failed Task instead of throwing exceptions).

Creating an additional state machine for that is just adding one layer of wrapping code with no added value - it is better to simply return the Task directly.

In other words: you get no efficiency benefit whatsoever from doing this, quite the contrary.

Answer 2

No, ConfigureAwait as its name suggests, configures the await. If you don't need to await then you don't need to configure it.

There's no added value in adding async-await just to use ConfigureAwait as it only affects your method and not the calling method. If the caller needs to use ConfigureAwait they will do so themselves.

Having an async method instead of a simple Task-returning method is a valid choice for many reasons (e.g. exception handling), and it will require using ConfigureAwait but ConfigureAwait is not a good reason for doing that by itself.