Async/Await is an Effective Paradigm for Event Management in User Interfaces ACM Reference Format
(2026) ACM Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems — Location: Patras, Greece (30.June.2026)
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- Abstract
- Event Management in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) remains a fundamental challenge when relying on complex, domain-specific paradigms like event loops, callbacks, or reactive programming, which mix and match different paradigms. This leads to steep learning curves and difficult-to-maintain code bases. To address these limitations, this paper treats user interface events as an in-put/output operation that leverages the sophisticated, language-level concurrency features of the async/await paradigm, a standard for managing input/output-bound tasks in modern programming languages. Through an implemented proof-of-concept, we compare the async/await approach against existing event management alternatives. Our analysis demonstrates that the async/await paradigm is capable of covering the functional scope of existing alternatives while delivering unique and substantial benefits. It simplifies event management by utilizing native platform features like sequential flow control and exception handling, rather than implementing these concepts indirectly. The async/await paradigm offers an effective and unified model for event management that reduces the learning process and provide a powerful tool for designing complex systems and modernizing legacy code. Our findings advocate for adopting async/await as the foundational paradigm for building responsive and maintainable user interfaces.
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Grolaux, D., Nguyen, T.-D., & Vanderdonckt, J. (2026). Async/Await is an Effective Paradigm for Event Management in User Interfaces ACM Reference Format. In Valentino Artizzu, Francesco Chiossi (ed.), Proceedings of ACM EICS 2026 (pp. 1-10). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3807968.3810928