Tamed Asynchrony

You can get most of the benefits of asynchronous I/O by using synchronous I/O in a multithreaded program. Where, with asynchronous I/O, you would issue a request and check later to determine when it completes, you can instead have a separate thread perform the I/O synchronously. The main thread can then check (perhaps by calling pthread_join(3THR)) for the completion of the operation at some later time.