Asynchrony, in computer programming, refers to the occurrence of events independent of the main program flow and ways to deal with such events.
[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 the processor continues executing the program.
[1] A common way for dealing with asynchrony in a programming interface is to provide subroutines that return a future or promise that represents the ongoing operation, and a synchronizing operation that blocks until the future or promise is completed.
Some programming languages, such as Cilk, have special syntax for expressing an asynchronous procedure call.
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