On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 9:50 AM Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas
It’s a well-known problem that async is “contagious”: [...]
But C# and every other language that’s borrowed the idea has the same problem, and as far as I know, nobody’s thought of a good answer yet.
Threads don't have that problem: you can use non-thread-aware code with callbacks in your threaded program if you do your own locking. Haskell (GHC) doesn't have that problem: it has fibers that use a programming interface like C#/Python threads, but they're multiplexed by user-mode code within a single OS thread. 16-bit Windows didn't have that problem. Stackless and greenlet don't have that problem. It's a problem that can be solved by just doing the obvious thing, the thing that Python already did with threads: don't define a novel syntax for coroutines, but instead use the syntax that already existed. Async/await syntax is a static type system with two types, may-yield and will-not-yield. There's no provision for writing generic/polymorphic code over those types, so you have to write everything twice. Like any static type system it has some benefits, but I don't think it's worth the cost, especially in Python, which has always eschewed mandatory static typing. I don't know how to fix Python now that it's gone so thoroughly down this path (starting with the yield keyword 18 years ago). But it's not a problem that ever needed to exist. Coroutines aren't that hard. -- Ben