[Python-ideas] asyncore: included batteries don't fit

[Massimo DiPierro]

I would strongly support integrating gevents into the standard library.
That would finally make me switch to Python 3. :-)


On Oct 6, 2012, at 5:00 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> This is an incredibly important discussion.
> 
> I would like to contribute despite my limited experience with the
> various popular options. My own async explorations are limited to the
> constraints of the App Engine runtime environment, where a rather
> unique type of reactor is required. I am developing some ideas around
> separating reactors, futures, and yield-based coroutines, but they
> take more thinking and probably some experimental coding before I'm
> ready to write it up in any detail. For a hint on what I'm after, you
> might read up on monocle (https://github.com/saucelabs/monocle) and my
> approach to building coroutines on top of Futures
> (http://code.google.com/p/appengine-ndb-experiment/source/browse/ndb/tasklets.py#349).
> 
> In the mean time I'd like to bring up a few higher-order issues:
> 
> (1) How importance is it to offer a compatibility path for asyncore? I
> would have thought that offering an integration path forward for
> Twisted and Tornado would be more important.
> 
> (2) We're at a fork in the road here. On the one hand, we could choose
> to deeply integrate greenlets/gevents into the standard library. (It's
> not monkey-patching if it's integrated, after all. :-) I'm not sure
> how this would work for other implementations than CPython, or even
> how to address CPython on non-x86 architectures. But users seem to
> like the programming model: write synchronous code, get async
> operation for free. It's easy to write protocol parsers that way. On
> the other hand, we could reject this approach: the integration would
> never be completely smooth, there's the issue of other implementations
> and architectures, it probably would never work smoothly even for
> CPython/x86 when 3rd party extension modules are involved.
> Callback-based APIs don't have these downsides, but they are harder to
> program; however we can make programming them easier by using
> yield-based coroutines. Even Twisted offers those (inline callbacks).
> 
> Before I invest much more time in these ideas I'd like to at least
> have (2) sorted out.
> 
> -- 
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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