How to build effective Async APIs by Terry Crowley
kartick.substack.com
This is a summary of posts by Terry Crowley, former head of Office, on how to build async APIs that work well: • Async APIs: Synchronous APIs take a predictable time based on the input size, while asynchronous ones take an unpredictable time, because they rely on the network, databases, disks, etc. People sometimes think that synchronous APIs are fast and asynchronous, slow, but that’s not exactly right. Sorting a billion numbers takes time, but you can predict that based on the input size. On the other hand, fetching a one-byte file from a server can sometimes take a long time. So, synchronous APIs are predictable (not fast), and asynchronous ones are unpredictable (not slow).
How to build effective Async APIs by Terry Crowley
How to build effective Async APIs by Terry…
How to build effective Async APIs by Terry Crowley
This is a summary of posts by Terry Crowley, former head of Office, on how to build async APIs that work well: • Async APIs: Synchronous APIs take a predictable time based on the input size, while asynchronous ones take an unpredictable time, because they rely on the network, databases, disks, etc. People sometimes think that synchronous APIs are fast and asynchronous, slow, but that’s not exactly right. Sorting a billion numbers takes time, but you can predict that based on the input size. On the other hand, fetching a one-byte file from a server can sometimes take a long time. So, synchronous APIs are predictable (not fast), and asynchronous ones are unpredictable (not slow).