[Python-ideas] asyncio: factoring-out of the general mechanism

[Guido van Rossum]

Well, what else did you have in mind? Remember that until we fix the GIL
(which won't happen until Python 4) you won't get benefit from async
programming unless you are overlapping with I/O, and (due to the
limitations of select/poll/etc.) that is pretty much limited to network and
IPC (disk I/O in particular cannot be overlapped in this way).

The main other area of interest would be UI events (as in a browser or GUI)
and for that I think an adaptation of the asyncio event loop will be
suitable. (If you're not going to use them it's fine not to implement the
network-specific methods on an event loop.)

Note that the async/await keywords themselves have no direct link to an
event loop -- they are just a different way to spell generators. It's just
that they are only useful with asyncio or some other event loop library.

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Christoph Groth <christoph at grothesque.org>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a question/idea about the support for asynchronous programming in
> Python.
>
> With Python 3.5, support for asynchronous programming has been added to
> the core Python language.  The new language features, however, are only
> useful with an event loop, as provided (only?) by the asyncio stdlib
> module.
>
> I notice that already the class asyncio.AbstractEventLoop contains many
> things that to me seem very specific to particular applications.  For
> examples that class contains placeholders for methods that expect IP
> host names and IP ports as arguments.
>
> In a world where networking is done in other ways than through IP,
> Python would be still useful.  One could keep using most of the standard
> library that is not specific to IP networking.
>
> Asynchronous programming is a concept that is way more universal than
> many of the things in asyncio (IP ports, unix pipes, etc.).  Has there
> been a discussion about separating the abstract bits needed for
> asynchronous programming in Python from the application-specific ones?
> Or would this be a bad idea for some reason?
>
> Christoph
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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