[Python-Dev] Timeout for PEP 550 / Execution Context discussion

[Yury Selivanov]

Hi,

It looks like the discussion about the execution context became
extremely hard to follow.  There are many opinions on how the spec for
generators should look like.  What seems to be "natural"
behaviour/example to one, seems to be completely unreasonable to other
people.  Recent emails from Guido indicate that he doesn't want to
implement execution contexts for generators (at least in 3.7).

In another thread Guido said this: "... Because coroutines and
generators are similar under the covers, Yury demonstrated the issue
with generators instead of coroutines (which are unfamiliar to many
people). And then somehow we got hung up about fixing the problem in
the example."

And Guido is right.  My initial motivation to write PEP 550 was to
solve my own pain point, have a solution for async code.
'threading.local' is completely unusable there, but complex code bases
demand a working solution.  I thought that because coroutines and
generators are so similar under the hood, I can design a simple
solution that will cover all edge cases.  Turns out it is not possible
to do it in one pass.

Therefore, in order to make some progress, I propose to split the
problem in half:

Stage 1. A new execution context PEP to solve the problem *just for
async code*.  The PEP will target Python 3.7 and completely ignore
synchronous generators and asynchronous generators.  It will be based
on PEP 550 v1 (no chained lookups, immutable mapping or CoW as an
optimization) and borrow some good API decisions from PEP 550 v3+
(contextvars module, ContextVar class).  The API (and C-API) will be
designed to be future proof and ultimately allow transition to the
stage 2.

Stage 2. When Python 3.7 is out, we'll see how people use execution
contexts for async code and collect feedback.  If we recognize that
Python users want execution contexts for generators/asynchronous
generators, we'll make a new PEP to add support for them in Python
3.8.  That future discussion will be focused on generators
specifically, and therefore I expect it to be somewhat more focused.

I will start working on the new PEP for stage 1 tomorrow.  I expect to
have a first version by the end of the week.

I will also publish PEP 550 v1 as a separate PEP (as v1 is a totally
different PEP anyways).

Thanks,
Yury