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> allows for the single-threaded non-blocking I/O in a way that no other popular language does.

C# Async and Await - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh191443.asp...

Twisted (Python) and EventMachine (Ruby) don't all of these do the same thing?

I believe twisted was an inspiration for node.

Yes. But they are tacked on to the language after the fact rather than built in from the beginning. My experience is that both language and libraries support that kind of pattern better in node than in Python (no Ruby experience with async).

were those in the language before or after node came out?

async/await are just sugar over the much older asynchronous delegate pattern that has been in the language since day one. So yes, they were.

are they widely used in APIs to e.g. send a query to the sql database or open a file?

Yes.

In .Net 4.5 there are Async versions of the web, file, stream, image and SQL category of functions.

It's also making its way into ASP.Net layer.

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