Why are Asynchronous processes not called Synchronous?

Question

So I\'m a little confused by this terminology.

Everyone refers to \"Asynchronous\" computing as running different processes on seperate threads, which gives the illu

Answer 1

I think there's a slant that is slightly different to most of the answers here.

Asynchronous means "not happening at the same time".

In the specific case of threading:

• Synchronous means "execute this code now".
• Asynchronous means "enqueue this work on a different thread that will be executed at some indeterminate time in the future"

This usually allows you to "do two things at once" because of reasons like:

• one thread is just waiting (e.g. for data to arrive on a serial port) so is asleep
• You have multiple processors, so the two threads can run concurrently.

However, even with 128 processor cores, the case is the same: the work will be executed "at some time in the future" (if perhaps the very near future) rather than "now".