Yury Selivanov added the comment: I think the original idea was to document that all methods of the loop are coroutines, so that: 1. if a user needs a Future object they call ensure_future: fut = asyncio.ensure_future(loop.method()) 2. it gives us ability to refactor things. For instance, sock_connect was a method that returned Futures, but at one point of 3.5 we changed it to be coroutine. Because the method was documented as a coroutine, it wasn't strictly a backwards incompatible way. In general, I think it would be safer for us to simple make all loop methods coroutines. Or, less radical, just keeping the status quo: document everything as a coroutine. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue29344> _______________________________________