real-time

In applications like autonomous vehicles or high-frequency trading systems, it is crucial to have a real-time system that can quickly process information and respond to changes or inputs. This ensures that any delays are minimized to avoid undesirable consequences.

Real-time systems operate at various scales, such as nanoseconds, microseconds, or milliseconds, with different levels of strictness.

Some practitioners categorize real-time systems into near real-time, soft real-time, and hard real-time, depending on the impact of missing a deadline.

It should be noted that the term "real-time" has a specific meaning in computer science and engineering and is often used more casually or loosely in everyday conversation or marketing to imply speediness.

See: human-scale time vs. machine-scale time