[tuhdo]

It's quite more popular than you think. `M-x term` is an example. It's a full-blown terminal emulator in Emacs that runs entirely in another process. Here is another example of async grep/ack/ag: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-projectile.html#sec-9 . As you can see, Emacs gets line by line results from grep/ack/ag without blocking and gives you new results and you type.

Or Emacs's fantastic support for communicating with REPLs in many interpreted languages.

You can execute any shell command asynchronously while doing other things inside Emacs. You can even compile with beautiful output, in terminal: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/compilation-compile.gif

Or built-in GDB integration, also asynchronous: http://tuhdo.github.io/static/c-ide/gdb-many-windows.gif.

Another GDB screenshot: https://flic.kr/p/6FW7Q7.

And Emacs officially supports asynchronous IO, while in Vim it's a hack from Vim Script.