Topic summary

Coroutines

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Coroutine.

Threads

Coroutines are very similar to threads. However, coroutines are cooperatively multitasked, whereas threads are typically preemptively multitasked. Coroutines provide concurrency, because they allow tasks to be performed out of order or in a changeable order, without changing the overall outcome, but they do not provide parallelism, because they do not execute multiple tasks simultaneously. The advantages of coroutines over threads are that they may be used in a hard real-time context (switching between coroutines does not involve any system calls or any blocking calls whatsoever), there is no need for synchronization primitives such as mutexes, semaphores, etc. in order to guard critical sections, and there is no need for support from the operating system.