Glossary · Phase 7 · Software engineering

Coroutine

Also written: coroutines

A function that can pause while it waits and resume later, written with async def in Python.

async def makes a coroutine, a function that can pause. await pauses it until the result is ready, letting the loop run others. asyncio.gather starts them all and waits for every result. The Anthropic Python SDK has an AsyncAnthropic client for exactly this.
From the lesson Concurrency and async

Try it now

Watch the ready list. Each task runs to its next yield, then goes to the back of the line. The log shows them interleaving.

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Concurrency and async · Do many things at once: processes, threads and the event loop. About 40 minutes.

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Other terms from the same lesson

event loop: The part of an async program that runs many tasks on one thread, switching whenever one is waiting.
race condition: A bug where the result depends on the timing of tasks running at once, such as two updates where one gets lost.

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