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Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?

(also known as "non-blocking IO") is a technique applications use to allow performing of many IO operations without blocking the calling OS thread, and without needing to spawn many threads (i.e. one thread per operation).

Using asynchronous IO to approach this problem appears compelling: it allows you to handle many connections at once, without needing to increase the number of OS threads. To handle such cases, languages must provide some sort of alternative strategy such as performing the work in a dedicated pool of OS threads. In 2009, Tony Hoare stated that his invention of NULL pointers was something he considers a "billion-dollar mistake" due to the problems and headaches it brought with it.

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