Introduction to Asynchronous Programming
Understand the differences between synchronous and asynchronous execution in Dart. Learn why asynchronous programming is crucial for Flutter apps to maintain smooth user interfaces by preventing blocking operations. This lesson helps you grasp how Dart handles long-running tasks to keep applications responsive and efficient.
Synchronous execution and blocking
By default, Dart executes code synchronously. This means it reads and executes your program line by line, from top to bottom. The program will not move on to the next line of code until the current line has completely finished its task.
For simple calculations, this happens almost instantly. However, imagine your application needs to download a large image from the internet. If the download takes three seconds, a synchronous program will completely stop at that line of code for three seconds. We call this a blocking operation because it blocks the rest of the program from executing. ...