Package async v0.12.0

Async is a library for asynchronous programming, i.e., programming where some part of the program must wait for things that happen at times determined by some external entity (like a human or another program). This includes pretty much any program that uses blocking calls (e.g., networking code, disk access), timeouts, or event loops (e.g., GUIs).

In a nutshell, the idea is to use non-preemptive user-level threads and first-class blocking operations with blocking expressed in the type system.

Read more in Chapter 18 of Real World OCaml.

Organization

Async comprises three packages, Async_kernel, Async_unix, and Async_extra.

• Async_kernel contains Async's core data structures, like Deferred. Async_kernel is portable, and so can be used in JavaScript using Async_js. In principle it could also be used on Windows, but no scheduler has been written for Async on Windows as of yet.

• Async_unix adds Unix dependencies for things like system calls and threads. Using these, it hooks the Async_kernel scheduler up to either `epoll` or `select`, depending on availabilty, and manages a thread pool that blocking system calls run in.

• Async_extra includes extras like command-line handling and RPC support built on top of those two packages.

You can most easily understand Async's API by reading the documentation of these individually.

The full API is also browsable here.

Extra libraries

This package also includes a few extra libraries that depend on Async:

• Lock_file_async
• Log_extended
• Persistent_connection
• Unpack_sequence

Package info