Futures
Parallel collections offer a simple, yet powerful, framework for parallel operations. However, they are limited in one respect: the total amount of work must be known in advance, and each thread must perform the same function (possibly on different inputs).
Imagine that we want to write a program that fetches a web page (or queries a web API) every few seconds and extracts data for further processing from this web page. A typical example might involve querying a web API to maintain an up-to-date value of a particular stock price. Fetching data from an external web page takes a few hundred milliseconds, typically. If we perform this operation on the main thread, it will needlessly waste CPU cycles waiting for the web server to reply.
The ...
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