Coroutine
computer software component
Coroutines are computer program components that can be suspended and resumed — generalizing subroutines — for cooperative multitasking. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes.
They have been described as "functions whose execution you can pause".
Melvin Conway coined the term coroutine in 1958 when he applied it to the construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963.
Definition and types
There is no single precise definition of coroutine. In 1980 Christopher D. Marlin summarized two widely-acknowledged fundamental characteristics of a coroutine:
the values of data local to a coroutine persist between successive calls;
the execution of a coroutine is suspended as control leaves it, only to carry on where it left off when control re-enters the coroutine at some later stage.
Besides that, a coroutine implementation has 3 features:
the control-transfer mechanism. Asymmetric coroutines usually provide keywords like yield and resume. Programmers cannot freely choose which frame to yield to.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Coroutine” is computer software component. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Coroutine, computer and software, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1339231. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1963 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coroutine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.