Final answer:
The term 'fire and forget' is used to describe the approach of launching a coroutine without waiting for it to finish or return any results. This approach improves the performance of applications by achieving concurrency. An example of launching a coroutine in a 'fire and forget' manner using Python's asyncio library is shown.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term 'fire and forget' is used in the context of launching a coroutine because once the coroutine is launched, the code that launches it does not wait for the coroutine to finish or return any results. It simply starts the coroutine and moves on to the next line of code, 'forgetting' about the coroutine.
This is different from synchronous programming, where we would typically wait for a function to finish executing and return a result before moving on. By launching a coroutine using the 'fire and forget' approach, we can achieve concurrency and improve the performance of our applications.
For example, in Python's asyncio library, we can use the asyncio.create_task() function to launch a coroutine in a 'fire and forget' manner:
import asyncio
async def my_coroutine():
# Some code here
async def main():
# Launch the coroutine
asyncio.create_task(my_coroutine())
# Other code here
asyncio.run(main())
In this example, once the my_coroutine() coroutine is launched using create_task(), the main() function does not wait for the coroutine to finish. It can continue executing other code while the coroutine runs concurrently.