Asynchrony, incomputer programming, refers to the occurrence of events independent of the mainprogram flow and ways to deal with such events. These may be "outside" events such as the arrival ofsignals, or actions instigated by a program that take placeconcurrently with program execution, without the programhanging to wait for results.[1]Asynchronous input/output is an example of the latter case of asynchrony, and lets programs issue commands to storage or network devices that service these requests while theprocessor continues executing the program. Doing so provides a degree ofconcurrency.[1]
A common way for dealing with asynchrony in aprogramming interface is to providesubroutines that return afuture or promise that represents the ongoing operation, and a synchronizing operation thatblocks until the future or promise is completed. Some programming languages, such asCilk, have special syntax for expressing an asynchronous procedure call.[2]
Examples of asynchrony include the following:
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