This method will make sure the action is scheduled to run on the target locality. Applying the action itself does not wait for the function to start running or to complete, instead this is a fully asynchronous operation similar to using hpx::apply as described above. The difference is that this method will return an instance of a hpx::future<> encapsulating the result of the (possibly remote) execution. The future can be used to synchronize with the asynchronous operation. The following example shows how to apply the action from above on the local locality:

some_global_action act;     // define an instance of some_global_action
hpx::future<void> f = hpx::async(act, hpx::find_here(), 2.0);
//
// ... other code can be executed here
//
f.get();    // this will possibly wait for the asyncronous operation to 'return'

(as before, the function hpx::find_here() returns the id of the local locality (the locality this code is executed on).

	Note
	The use of a hpx::future<void> allows the current thread to synchronize with any remote operation not returning any value.

	Note
	Any std::future<> returned from std::async() is required to block in its destructor if the value has not been set for this future yet. This is not true for hpx::future<> which will never block in its destriuctor, even if the value has not been returned to the future yet. We believe that consistency in the behavior of futures is more important than standards conformance in this case.

Any component member function can be invoked using the same syntactic construct. Given that id is the global address for a component instance created earlier, this invocation looks like:

some_component_action act;     // define an instance of some_component_action
hpx::future<int> f = hpx::async(act, id, "42");
//
// ... other code can be executed here
//
cout << f.get();    // this will possibly wait for the asyncronous operation to 'return' 42

	Note
	The invocation of f.get() will return the result immediately (without suspending the calling thread) if the result from the asynchronous operation has already been returned. Otherwise, the invocation of f.get() will suspend the execution of the calling thread until the asynchronous operation returns its result.