[Python-ideas] The async API of the future: Reactors

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> - There's an abstract Reactor class and an abstract Async I/O object
>> class.
>
> Can we please use a better term than "reactor" for this?
> Its meaning is only obvious to someone familiar with Twisted.
>
> Not being such a person, it's taken me a while to figure out
> from this discussion that it refers to the central object
> implementing the event loop, and not one of the user-supplied
> objects that could equally well be described as "reacting"
> to events.
>
> Something like "dispatcher" would be clearer, IMO.

Sorry about that. I'm afraid it's too late for this thread's subject
line, but I will try to make sure that if and when this makes it into
the standard library it'll have a more appropriate name. I would
recommend event loop (which is the name I naturally would give it when
asked out of context) or I/O loop, which is what Tornado apparently
used. Dispatcher would not be my first choice.

FWIW, it's not a completely Twisted-specific term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern

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