[Python-Dev] PEP 492: async/await in Python; version 5

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5 May 2015 at 21:00, Yury Selivanov <yselivanov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2015-05-05 3:40 PM, Jim J. Jewett wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue May 5 18:29:44 CEST 2015, Yury Selivanov posted an updated
> PEP492.
> >>
> >> Where are the following over-simplifications wrong?
> >>
> >> (1)  The PEP is intended for use (almost exclusively) with
> >> asychronous IO and a scheduler such as the asynchio event loop.
> >
> > Yes. You can also use it for UI loops.  Basically, anything
> > that can call your code asynchronously.
>
> Given that the stdlib doesn't provide an example of such a UI loop,
> what would a 3rd party module need to implement to provide such a
> thing? Can any of the non-IO related parts of asyncio be reused for
> the purpose, or must the 3rd party module implement everything from
> scratch?
>
> To me, this is an important question, as it cuts directly to the heart
> of the impression people have that coroutines and async are "only for
> asyncio".
>
> I'd be interested in writing, for instructional purposes, a toy but
> complete event loop. But I'm *not* really interested in trying to
> reverse engineer the required interface.
>

This is a great idea. What kind of application do you have in mind?

I think the main real-life use case for using coroutines with a UI event
loop is newer Windows code. C# (and IIUC VB) has coroutines very much along
the lines of PEP 492, and all code that does any kind of I/O (whether disk
or network) must be written as a coroutine. This requirement is enforced by
the C# compiler: the basic system calls for doing I/O are coroutines, and
in order to get their result you must use an await expression, which in
turn may only be used in a coroutine. Thus all code that may invoke an I/O
call ends up being a coroutine. This is exactly the type of constraint
we're trying to introduce into Python with PEP 492 (except of course we're
not making all I/O primitives coroutines -- that would be madness, we're
going with optional instead).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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