[Python-ideas] Async API

[Steve Dower]

> One question: what do we actually want to get?  What're the goals?
>
> - A specification (PEP?) of how to make stdlib more async-friendly?
> 
> - To develop a separate library that may be included in the stdlib one day?
>
> - And what's your opinion on writing a PEP about making it possible to pass a custom socket-factory to stdlib objects?
>
> I'm (and I think it's not just me) a bit lost here, after reading 100s of emails on python-ideas.  And I just want to know where to channel my energy and expertise ;)

It's not just you, I'm not entirely clear on what we expect to end up with either.

My current view is that we'll get a PEP that defines a convention for user code and an interface for schedulers. Adding *_async() methods to the entire standard library could take a long time and should probably be divided up so we can have really experienced devs on particular areas (e.g. someone on Windows sockets, someone else on Linux sockets, etc.) and may need individual PEPs.

My hope is that the first PEP provides a protocol for users to defer the rest of a task until after some/any operation has completed - I don't really want sockets/networking/files/threads/etc. to leak through at all, though these are all important use cases that need to be tried.

This is the way I'm approaching it, so please let me know if I'm off the mark :)

Cheers,
Steve