Since the signals and slots mechanism is asynchronous in nature, we can make use of it for things other than user interfaces. In programming terms, an asynchronous operation is a process that works independently, allowing the program to continue its operation without waiting for the process to complete, which may stall the whole program.

Qt 5 allows you to make use of its signals and slots mechanism to easily achieve asynchronous processes without much effort. This is even more true after Qt 5 introduced the new syntax for signals and slots, which allows a signal to trigger a normal function instead of a slot function from a QObject.

In the following example, we will further explore this opportunity and learn how we can improve our program's efficiency by using asynchronous operations through the signals and slots mechanism that's provided by Qt 5.