Introduction to Asynchronous Programming （介绍了异步编程）.pdf

Introduction to Asynchronous Programming In this document we introduce an asynchronous model for concurrent programming. For certain appli- cations, an asynchronous model may yield performance benefits over traditional multithreading. Much of 1 the material presented in this document is taken from Dave Peticola’s excellent introduction to Twisted , a Python framework for asynchronous programming. 1 The Models We will start by reviewing two (hopefully) familiar models in order to contrast them with the asynchronous model. By way of illustration we will imagine a program that consists of three conceptually distinct tasks which must be performed to complete the program. Note I am using task in the non-technical sense of something that needs to be done. The first model we will look at is the single-threaded synchronous model, in Figure 1 below: Figure 1: The single-threaded synchronous model This is the simplest style of programming. Each task is performed one at a time, with one finishing completely before another is started. And if the tasks are always performed in a definite order, the imple- mentation of a later task can assume that all earlier tasks have finished without errors, with all their output available for use — a definite simplification in logic. We can contrast the single-threaded synchronous model with the multi-threaded synchronous model illustrated in Figure 2. In this model, each task is performed in a separate thread of control. The threads are managed by the operating system and may, on a system with multiple processors or multiple cores, run truly concurrently, 1/?page_id=1327 1 CS168