Beef Up Flow Graphs with Async Nodes

Back in 2005, Herb Sutter wrote “The free lunch is over” paper to warn us about the dawn of the multicore era and its implications on software development. In the multicore era, developers who care about performance can no longer sit back and lazily wait for the next processor generation in order to gleefully see their apps running faster. Those days are long gone. Herb’s message was that developers who care about fully exploiting modern processors would have to embrace parallelism. At this point of the book, we certainly know this, so what? Well, we believe that today “Lunch is getting much too expensive.” Let’s elaborate on this.