Documentation boost.async

Many languages provide a simple programming languages like node.js and python provide easy to use single-threaded concurrency frameworks. While more complex than synchronous code, single threaded asynchronicity avoids many of the pitfalls & overhead of multi-threading.

That is, one coroutine can work, while others wait for events (e.g. a response from a server). This allows to write applications that do multiple things simultaneously on a single thread.

This library is meant to provide this to C++: simple single threaded asynchronicity akin to node.js and asyncio in python that works with existing libraries like boost.beast, boost.mysql or boost.redis. It based on boost.asio.

It takes a collection of concepts from other languages and provides them based on C++20 coroutines.

Unlike asio::awaitable and asio::experimental::coro, async coroutines are open. That is, an asio::awaitable can only await and be awaited by other asio::awaitable and does not provide coroutine specific synchronization mechanisms.

async on the other hand provides a coroutine specific channel and different wait types (select, gather etc.) that are optimized to work with coroutines and awaitables.