Asynchronous programming is a strategy for deferring operations with high latency or low priority, usually in an attempt to improve performance, responsiveness, and / or composability of software. Such strategies are usually employed using some combination of event-driven programming and callbacks, and optionally making use of concurrency through coroutines and / or threads.
Asynchronous programming is a strategy for deferring operations with high latency or low priority, usually in an attempt to improve performance, responsiveness, and / or composability of software. Such strategies are usually employed using some combination of event-driven programming and callbacks, and optionally making use of concurrency through coroutines and / or threads.
Asynchronous programming is used in many situations:
- handling user input in UIs and games,
- processing network traffic,
- performing disk I/O,
- batching work,
- and more.
Asynchronous programming models can aid in software composition in many languages (notably languages where functions are first-class types) and APIs providing callback-based completion messaging. Proper use of this programming methodology can improve throughput and improve responsiveness by reducing total latency of job batches when executed in parallel. This approach can also result in an increase in system throughput at the cost of increased operational latency resulting from deferred processing.
