-
Book Overview & Buying
-
Table Of Contents
Systems Programming with Zig
By :
The shift toward asynchronous I/O is primarily driven by the need to handle a high volume of concurrent operations without the overhead of traditional threading. In a synchronous model, each I/O request — such as reading from a disk or waiting for a network packet — blocks the execution of the calling thread. This blocking behavior forces the OS to perform a context switch to another thread to keep the CPU busy, a process that involves saving and restoring registers and kernel-level bookkeeping. As the number of concurrent connections grows into the thousands, the memory consumed by individual thread stacks and the CPU cycles lost to context switching become a major bottleneck. Asynchronous programming addresses this by allowing a single thread to initiate multiple I/O operations and continue executing other logic while the hardware or kernel processes those requests.
This chapter covers: