On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 12:20 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
As Nick said earlier: the caller always blocks; by extension (to my mind, at least) putting an `await` in front of something is saying, "it's okay if other tasks run while I'm blocking on this call."
Apologies if this is a really REALLY dumb question, but... How hard would it be to then dispense with the await keyword, and simply _always_ behave that way? Something like: def data_from_socket(): # Other tasks may run while we wait for data # The socket.read() function has yield points in it data = socket.read(1024, 1) return transmogrify(data) def respond_to_socket(): while True: data = data_from_socket() # We can pretend that socket writes happen instantly, # but if ever we can't write, it'll let other tasks wait while # we're blocked on it. socket.write("Got it, next please!") Do these functions really need to be aware that there are yield points in what they're calling? I come from a background of thinking with threads, so I'm accustomed to doing blocking I/O and assuming/expecting that other threads will carry on while we wait. If asynchronous I/O can be made that convenient, it'd be awesome. But since it hasn't already been made that easy in every other language, I expect there's some fundamental problem with this approach, something that intrinsically requires every step in the chain to know what's a (potential) block point. ChrisA