Asynchrony is not concurrency
83 comments
·July 18, 2025jayd16
LegionMammal978
I'd count pure one-to-one parallelism as a form of concurrency that doesn't involve any yielding. But otherwise, I agree that all forms of non-parallel concurrency have to be yielding execution at some cadence, even if it's at the instruction level. (E.g., in CUDA, diverging threads in a warp will interleave execution of their instructions, in case one branch tries blocking on the other.)
omgJustTest
Concurrency does not imply yielding...
Synchronous logic does imply some syncing and yielding could be a way to sync - which is what i expect you mean.
Asynchronous logic is concurrent without sync or yield.
Concurrency and asynchronous logic do not exist - in real form - in von Neumann machines
kristoff_it
>I kind of think the author simply pulled the concept of yielding execution out of the definition of concurrency and into this new "asynchrony" term.
Quote from the article where the exact opposite is stated:
> (and task switching is – by the definition I gave above – a concept specific to concurrency)
threatofrain
IMO the author is mixed up on his definitions for concurrency.
tines
Can you explain more instead of linking a paper? I felt like the definitions were alright.
> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.
> Concurrency: the ability of a system to progress multiple tasks at a time, be it via parallelism or task switching.
> Parallelism: the ability of a system to execute more than one task simultaneously at the physical level.
ryandv
They're just different from what Lamport originally proposed. Asynchrony as given is roughly equivalent to Lamport's characterization of distributed systems as partially ordered, where some pairs of events can't be said to have occurred before or after one another.
One issue with the definition for concurrency given in the article would seem to be that no concurrent systems can deadlock, since as defined all concurrent systems can progress tasks. Lamport uses the word concurrency for something else: "Two events are concurrent if neither can causally affect the other."
Probably the notion of (a)causality is what the author was alluding to in the "Two files" example: saving two files where order does not matter. If the code had instead been "save file A; read contents of file A;" then, similarly to the client connect/server accept example, the "save" statement and the "read" statement would not be concurrent under Lamport's terminology, as the "save" causally affects the "read."
It's just that the causal relationship between two tasks is a different concept than how those tasks are composed together in a software model, which is a different concept from how those tasks are physically orchestrated on bare metal, and also different from the ordering of events..
kazinator
The definition of asynchrony is bad. It's possible for asynchronous requests to guarantee ordering, such that if a thread makes two requests A and B in that order, asynchronously, they will happen in that order.
Asynchrony means that the requesting agent is not blocked while submitting a request in order to wait for the result of that request.
Asynchronous abstractions may provide a synchronous way wait for the asynchronously submitted result.
threatofrain
Concurrency is the property of a program to be divided into partially ordered or completely unordered units of execution. It does not describe how you actually end up executing the program in the end, such as if you wish to exploit these properties for parallel execution or task switching. Or maybe you're running on a single thread and not doing any task switching or parallelism.
For more I'd look up Rob Pike's discussions for Go concurrency.
tines
The article understands this.
Lichtso
Concurrency is parallelism and/or asynchrony, simply the superset of the other two.
Asynchrony means things happen out of order, interleaved, interrupted, preempted, etc. but could still be just one thing at a time sequentially.
Parallelism means the physical time spent is less that the sum of the total time spent because things happen simultaneously.
jrvieira
careful: in many programming contexts parallelism and concurrency are exclusive concepts, and sometimes under the umbrella of async, which is a term that applies to a different domain.
in other contexts these words don't describe disjoint sets of things so it's important to clearly define your terms when talking about software.
michaelsbradley
Asynchrony also practically connotes nondeterminism, but a single-threaded concurrent program doesn't have to exhibit nondeterministic behavior.
andsoitis
> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.
Asynchrony is when things don't happen at the same time or in the same phase, i.e. is the opposite of Synchronous. It can describe a lack of coordination or concurrence in time, often with one event or process occurring independently of another.
The correctness statement is not helpful. When things happy asynchronously, you do not have guarantees about order, which may be relevant to "correctness of your program".
w10-1
> The correctness statement is not helpful
But... that's everything, and why it's included.
Undefined behavior from asynchronous computing is not worth study or investment, except to avoid it.
Virtually all of the effort for the last few decades (from super-scalar processors through map/reduce algorithms and Nvidia fabrics) involves enabling non-SSE operations that are correct.
So yes, as an abstract term outside the context of computing today, asynchrony does not guarantee correctness - that's the difficulty. But the only asynchronous computing we care about offers correctness guarantees of some sort (often a new type, e.g., "eventually consistent").
jkcxn
Not the OP, but in formal definitions like Communicating Sequential Processes, concurrency means the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct, as long as other synchronisation events happen
gowld
Concurrency implies asynchrony (two systems potentially doing work at the same time withut waiting for each other), but the converse is not true.
A single process can do work in an unordered (asynchronous) way.
amelius
> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.
Can't we just call that "independent"?
null
ninetyninenine
Doesn't multiple tasks at the same time make it simultaneous?
I think there needs to be a stricter definition here.
Concurrency is the ability of a system to chop a task into many tiny tasks. A side effect of this is that if the system chops all tasks into tiny tasks and runs them all in a sort of shuffled way it looks like parallelism.
carodgers
The author is aware that definitions exist for the terms he uses in his blog post. He is proposing revised definitions. As long as he is precise with his new definitions, this is fine. It is left to the reader to decide whether to adopt them.
WhitneyLand
He’s repurposing asynchrony that’s different from the way most literature and many developers use it, and that shift is doing rhetorical work to justify a particular Zig API split.
No thanks.
kazinator
Asynchrony, in this context, is an abstraction which separates the preparation and submission of a request from the collection of the result.
The abstraction makes it possible to submit multiple requests and only then begin to inquire about their results.
The abstraction allows for, but does not require, a concurrent implementation.
However, the intent behind the abstraction is that there be concurrency. The motivation is to obtain certain benefits which will not be realized without concurrency.
Some asynchronous abstractions cannot be implemented without some concurrency. Suppose the manner by which the requestor is informed about the completion of a request is not a blocking request on a completion queue, but a callback.
Now, yes, a callback can be issued in the context of the requesting thread, so everything is single-threaded. But if the requesting thread holds a non-recursive mutex, that ruse will reveal itself by causing a deadlock.
In other words, we can have an asynchronous request abstraction that positively will not work single threaded;
1 caller locks a mutex
2 caller submits request
3 caller unlocks mutex
4 completion callback occurs
If step 2 generates a callback in the same thread, then step 3 is never reached.
The implementation must use some minimal concurrency so that it has a thread waiting for 3 while allowing the requestor to reach that step.
tossandthrow
The author does not seem to have made any non-trivial projects with asynchronicity.
All the pitfalls of concurrency are there - in particular when executing non-idempotent functions multiple times before previous executions finish, then you need mutexes!
ajross
> All the pitfalls of concurrency are there [in async APIs]
This is one of those "in practice, theory and practice are different" situations.
There is nothing in the async world that looks like a parallel race condition. Code runs to completion until it deterministically yields, 100% of the time, even if the location of those yields may be difficult to puzzle out.
And so anyone who's ever had to debug and reason about a parallel race condition is basically laughing at that statement. It's just not the same.
kibwen
> Code runs to completion until it deterministically yields
No, because async can be (quote often is) used to perform I/O, whose time to completion does not need to be deterministic or predictable. Selecting on multiple tasks and proceeding with the one that completes first is an entirely ordinary feature of async programming. And even if you don't need to suffer the additional nondeterminism of your OS's thread scheduler, there's nothing about async that says you can't use threads as part of its implementation.
ang_cire
> Asynchrony is not concurrency
This is what I tell my boss when I miss standups.
danaugrs
Excellent article. I'm looking forward to Zig's upcoming async I/O.
butterisgood
It's kind of true...
I can do a lot of things asynchronously. Like, I'm running the dishwasher AND the washing machine for laundry at the same time. I consider those things not occurring at "the same time" as they're independent of one another. If I stood and watched one finish before starting the other, they'd be a kind of synchronous situation.
But, I also "don't care". I think of things being organized concurrently by the fact that I've got an outermost orchestration of asynchronous tasks. There's a kind of governance of independent processes, and my outermost thread is what turns the asynchronous into the concurrent.
Put another way. I don't give a hoot what's going on with your appliances in your house. In a sense they're not synchronized with my schedule, so they're asynchronous, but not so much "concurrent".
So I think of "concurrency" as "organized asynchronous processes".
Does that make sense?
Ah, also neither asynchronous nor concurrent mean they're happening at the same time... That's parallelism, and not the same thing as either one.
Ok, now I'll read the article lol
criddell
> I consider those things not occurring at "the same time" as they're independent of one another.
What would it take for you to consider them as running at the same time then?
kristoff_it
That eventually the server and the client are able to connect.
didibus
I think asynchronous as meaning out-of-sync, implies that there needs to be synchronicity between the two tasks.
In that case, asynchronous just means the state that two or more tasks that should be synchronized in some capacity for the whole behavior to be as desired, is not properly in-sync, it's out-of-sync.
Then I feel there can be many cause of asynchronous behavior, you can be out-of-sync due to concurent execution or due to parallel execution, or due to buggy synchronization, etc.
And because of that, I consider asynchronous programming as the mechanisms that one can leverage to synchronize asynchronous behavior.
But I guess you could also think of asynchronous as doesn't need to be synchronized.
Also haven't read the article yet lol
Retr0id
I don't get it - the "problem" with the client/server example in particular (which seems pivotal in the explanation). But I am also unfamiliar with zig, maybe that's a prerequisite. (I am however familiar with async, concurrency, and parallelism)
koakuma-chan
Example 1
You can write to one file, wait, and then write to the second file.
Concurrency not required.
Example 2
You can NOT do Server.accept, wait, and then do Client.connect, because Server.accept would block forever.
Concurrency required.
jayd16
But why is this a novel concept? The idea of starvation is well known and you don't need parallelism for it to effect you already. What does zig actually do to solve this?
Many other languages could already use async/await in a single threaded context with an extremely dumb scheduler that never switches but no one wants that.
I'm trying to understand but I need it spelled out why this is interesting.
tines
Oh, I see. The article is saying that async is required. I thought it was saying that parallelism is required. The way it's written makes it seem like there's a problem with the code sample, not that the code sample is correct.
Retr0id
The article later says (about the server/client example)
> Unfortunately this code doesn’t express this requirement [of concurrency], which is why I called it a programming error
I gather that this is a quirk of the way async works in zig, because it would be correct in all the async runtimes I'm familiar with (e.g. python, js, golang).
My existing mental model is that "async" is just a syntactic tool to express concurrent programs. I think I'll have to learn more about how async works in zig.
null
sedatk
Blocking async code is not async. In order for something to execute "out of order", you must have an escape mechanism from that task, and that mechanism essentially dictates a form of concurrency. Async must be concurrent, otherwise it stops being async. It becomes synchronous.
nemothekid
Consider:
readA.await
readB.await
join(readA, readB).await
vitaminCPP
This is exactly what the article is trying to debunk.
didibus
If you need to do A and then B in that order, but you're doing B and then A. It doesn't matter if you're doing B and then A in a single thread, the operations are out of sync.
So I guess you could define this scenario as asynchronous.
jayd16
So wait, is the word they mean by asynchrony actually the word "dependency"?
Jtsummers
> So wait, is the word they mean by asynchrony actually the word "dependency"?
No, the definition provided for asynchrony is:
>> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.
Which is not dependence, but rather independence. Asynchronous, in their definition, is concurrent with no need for synchronization or coordination between the tasks. The contrasted example which is still concurrent but not asynchronous is the client and server one, where the order matters (start the server after the client, or terminate the server before the client starts, and it won't work correctly).
raluk
One thing that most languages are lacking is expressing lazy return values. -> await f1() + await f2() and to express this concurently requres manually handing of futures.
jayd16
you mean like?
await Join(f1(), f2())
Promise1 = f1(); Promise2 = f2();
await Join(Promise1, Promise2);
zmj
That's because f2's result could depend on whether f1 has executed.
ioasuncvinvaer
Is there anything new in this article?
butterisgood
Perhaps not, but sometimes the description from a different angle helps somebody understand the concepts better.
I don't know how many "monad tutorials" I had to read before it all clicked, and whether it ever fully clicked!
gowld
Most gen ed articles on HN are not new ideas, just articles that could be pages from a textbook.
butterisgood
> Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing (context switching)
Wikipedia had the wrong idea about microkernels for about a decade too, so ... here we are I guess.
It's not a _wrong_ description but it's incomplete...
Consider something like non-strict evaluation, in a language like Haskell. One can be evaluating thunks from an _infinite_ computation, terminate early, and resume something else just due to the evaluation patterns.
That is something that could be simulated via generators with "yield" in other languages, and semantically would be pretty similar.
Also consider continuations in lisp-family languages... or exceptions for error handling.
You have to assume all things could occur simultaneously relative to each other in what "feels like" interrupted control flow to wrangle with it. Concurrency is no different from the outside looking in, and sequencing things.
Is it evaluated in parallel? Who knows... that's a strategy that can be applied to concurrent computation, but it's not required. Nor is "context switching" unless you mean switched control flow.
The article is very good, but if we're going by the "dictionary definition" (something programming environments tend to get only "partially correct" anyway), then I think we're kind of missing the point.
The stuff we call "asynchronous" is usually a subset of asynchronous things in the real world. The stuff we treat as task switching is a single form of concurrency. But we seem to all agree on parallelism!
I kind of think the author simply pulled the concept of yielding execution out of the definition of concurrency and into this new "asynchrony" term. Then they argued that the term is needed because without it the entire concept of concurrency is broken.
Indeed so, but I would argue that concurrency makes little sense without the ability to yield and is therefore intrinsic to it. Its a very important concept but breaking it out into a new term adds confusion, instead of reducing it.