Practical examples

Now it’s time to implement some examples to tackle real-life scenarios using std::async. We will learn how to do the following:

• Perform parallel computation and aggregation
• Asynchronously search across different containers or a large dataset
• Asynchronously multiply two matrices
• Chain asynchronous operations
• Improve the pipeline example from the last chapter

Parallel computation and aggregation

Data aggregation is the process of collecting raw data from multiple sources and organizing, processing, and providing a summary of the data for easy consumption. This process is useful in many fields, such as business reporting, financial services, healthcare, social media monitoring, research, and academia.

As a naive example, let’s compute the result of squaring all numbers between 1 and n and obtaining their average value. We know that using the following formula to compute the sum of square values would be much quicker...