Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

The async invasion

Stephen Cleary (Faithlife)
2:35pm–3:15pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Software methodologies
 Location: C123/124
Level: Intermediate
Average rating: ***..
(3.50, 4 ratings)
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Who is this presentation for?

  • Software developers

What you'll learn

  • Understand why async/await is necessary for modern application development

Description

The async keyword seems to be taking over the world. After a humble beginning in F#, it quickly moved to C#/VB, and today it is invading many other “big” languages, including JavaScript (ES2017), Python, and C++ (“resumable functions” proposal).

So what’s the big deal about async?

Stephen Cleary explains why so many languages are adopting async/await and why that’s a good thing. Stephen begins with a conceptual overview of why asynchrony is important, especially in modern computing, and discusses how language support for asynchrony helps developers write clearer, more maintainable code. Stephen then shares examples in an abstract language and shows how new keywords simplify all previous patterns of asynchrony. You’ll learn why async needs to be a language feature—that is, how an actual async keyword helps developers express code in a way that a library could not. By the end of this session, you’ll have a clear grasp of why async is so helpful as well as a sense of how to apply it to your own projects, regardless of language.

Photo of Stephen Cleary

Stephen Cleary

Faithlife

Stephen Cleary is a senior software engineer at Faithlife. Steve is a Christian, husband, and father who programs software in his spare time. His work usually deals with asynchronous and multithreaded programming, but he finds any challenging subject interesting. These days he uses C# and JavaScript but remains interested in many different languages. Steve is a Microsoft MVP and the author of Concurrency in C# Cookbook as well as several MSDN articles. He’s also the top answerer for async/await questions on Stack Overflow.