How Programming Languages Model Asynchronous Program Flow
In the previous chapter, we covered asynchronous program flow, concurrency, and parallelism in general terms. In this chapter, we’ll narrow our scope. Specifically, we’ll look into different ways to model and deal with concurrency in programming languages and libraries.
It’s important to keep in mind that threads, futures, fibers, goroutines, promises, etc. are abstractions that give us a way to model an asynchronous program flow. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but they share a goal of giving programmers an easy-to-use (and importantly, hard to misuse), efficient, and expressive way of creating a program that handles tasks in a non-sequential, and often unpredictable, order.
The lack of precise definitions is prevalent here as well; many terms have a name that stems from a concrete implementation at some point in time but has later taken on a more general meaning that encompasses different...
