Threads vs. Async

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  1. It is very difficult to write code that is thread safe. With asyncronous code, you know exactly where the code will shift from one task to the next and race conditions are therefore much harder to come by.
  2. Threads consume a fair amount of data since each thread needs to have its own stack. With async code, all the code shares the same stack and the stack is kept small due to continuously unwinding the stack between tasks.
  3. Threads are OS structures and are therefore more memory for the platform to support. There is no such problem with asynchronous tasks.

Update 2022:

Many languages now support stackless co-routines (async/await). This allows us to write a task almost synchronously while yielding to other tasks (awaiting) at set places (sleeping or waiting for networking or other threads)

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