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Doc wording: use “concurrent” instead of “parallel” in Future.wait extensions #902
The current documentation for FutureIterable.wait and the record extensions (e.g. FutureRecord2.wait, FutureRecord3.wait, etc.) states that they "Wait for futures in parallel."
Concurrency: multiple tasks are in progress at the same time, but may be interleaved on a single thread (as Dart Futures are, running on the event loop).
Parallelism: multiple tasks are executing simultaneously on multiple CPU cores.
In Dart, unless isolates are explicitly used, futures do not run in parallel; they run concurrently.
Why this matters:
Developers new to async may assume Dart is running their futures on multiple CPU cores, which is misleading.
Using “concurrent” is more precise, while still being understandable to most readers.
Proposed fix:
Update doc comments in dart:async extensions to say something like:
/// Waits for all futures to complete concurrently.
This keeps the intent clear while avoiding the incorrect use of “parallel.”
That does appear to be the accepted terminology.
Parallelism implices concurrency, but not the other way, and Dart only has concurrency inside a single isolate, not parallelism (not of Dart code at least).
(I'm used to Java where "concurrency" is used about multithreading, which is technically correct. It might also be parallelism.)
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lrhn commentedon Sep 1, 2025
That does appear to be the accepted terminology.
Parallelism implices concurrency, but not the other way, and Dart only has concurrency inside a single isolate, not parallelism (not of Dart code at least).
(I'm used to Java where "concurrency" is used about multithreading, which is technically correct. It might also be parallelism.)
xlkv commentedon May 3, 2026
This wording is actually in
dart-lang/sdk, notpackage:asynclrhn commentedon Jun 3, 2026
It's probably everywhere. I'm, if nothing else, consistent 😉 .
[dart:async] Use "concurrently" instead of "parallel" in Future.wait …