Asynchronous Programming

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Key Terms

Async vs Sync

• Sync → tasks run sequentially, blocks execution flow
• Async → tasks run concurrently, non-blocking

Concurrency vs Parallelism

• Concurrency → multiple tasks run start and complete in overlapping time periods
• Parallelism → multiple tasks run simultaneously using multiple processors
• Event Loop (Python) or Task Scheduler (.NET) → used to manage async execution

Why?

• Improved application responsiveness
• Efficient handling of IO-bound operations
• Better utilization of hardware
• More scalable applications

Async/Await in C#

• Uses async and await keywords
• Based on Task and Task<T> for async operations
• A Task is a monad
  • “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors” 🤓
  • A functional grouping of returned data
• A Task represents something that happened on a different processor

Await in C#

• The await keyword waits for the boolean value of Task to be true
• When that happens, the data of Task is unwrapped by the await keyword
• async function can then return the data that has been unwrapped to its called

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