asyncio: What is the difference between tasks, futures, and coroutines?

[Paul Moore]

I'm working my way through the asyncio documentation. I have got to the "Tasks and coroutines" section, but I'm frankly confused as to the difference between the various things described in that section: coroutines, tasks, and futures.

I think can understand a coroutine. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's roughly "something that you can run which can suspend itself".

But I don't understand what a Future is. The document just says it's almost the same as a concurrent.futures.Future, which is described as something that "encapsulates the asynchronous execution of a callable". Which doesn't help a lot. In concurrent.futures, you don't create Futures, you get them back from submit(), but in the asyncio docs it looks like you can create them by hand (example "Future with run_until_complete"). And there's nothing that says what a Future is, just what it's like... :-(

A Task is a subclass of Future, but the documentation doesn't say what it *is*, but rather that it "schedules the execution of a coroutine". But that doesn't make sense to me - objects don't do things, they *are* things. I thought the event loop did the scheduling?

Reading between the lines, it seems that the event loop schedules Tasks (which makes sense) and that Tasks somehow wrap up coroutines - but I don't see *why* you need to wrap a task in a coroutine rather than just scheduling coroutines. And I don't see where Futures fit in - why not just wrap a coroutine in a Future, if it needs to be wrapped up at all?

I concede that I've not read the rest of the asyncio documentation in much detail yet, and I'm skipping everything to do with IO (I want to understand the "async" bit for now, not so much the "IO" side). But I don't really want to dive into the details while I am this hazy on the basic concepts.

Can anyone clarify for me?

Thanks,
Paul