Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
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Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
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Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#2async python is awful. to me it is a by default avoid. and when you can't avoid, use only where it provides outsized benefit.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#3Exceptions are difficult to deal with. Also, while they've had async for 10 years it has changed quite a bit from the initial incarnation.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#4I went through a phase of writing asyncio servers for my side projects. Probably the most fun I had was writing things that were responsive in complex ways, such as a websockets server that was also listening on message queues or on a TCP connection to a Denon HEOS music player.
Eventually I wrote an "image sorter" that I found was hanging up when the browser was trying to download images in parallel, the image serving should not have been CPU bound, I was even using sendfile(), but I think other requests would hold up the CPU and would be block the tiny amount of CPU needed to set up that sendfile.
So I switched from aiohttp to the flask API and serve with either Flask or Gunicorn, I even front it with Microsoft IIS or nginx to handle the images so Python doesn't have to. It is a minor hassle because I develop on Windows so I have to run Gunicorn inside WSL2 but it works great and I don't have to think about server performance anymore.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#5I think part of it is historical. WSGI has been around a while before async became relevant. The industry now has had ASGI for a while, but if your WSGI deployed web application doesn't need to squeeze out all the juice it can with async, you might not be phased by not using it or bothered at all.
Reminds me of how long it took some to go from Python 2 to Python 3.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#6async, parallelism, concurrency, why not all three? JS, the canonical async (at least today) language, has had neither parallelism nor concurrency primitives for a good decade or so after its inception.
I personally blame low async adoption in Python on 1) general reduction in its popularity vs Typescript+node, which is driven by the desire to have a single stack on the frontend and backend, not by bad or good async implementations in Python (see also: Rails, once the poster child of the Web, now nearly forgotten) 2) lack of good async stdlib. parallelism and concurrency are distant thirds.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#7Python's async is very difficult to use and debug. It seems to get stuck randomly, read like race conditions. And Python cannot work around this nicely with their lambdas only permitting a single expression in their body.
Not worth the trouble. Shell pipelines are way easier to use. Or simply waiting —no pun intended— for the synchronous to finish.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#8You can’t just plug and play it. As soon as you introduce async you need to have the runtime loop and so on. Basically the whole architecture needs to be redesigned
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#9It’s probably related to the fact that when they added “await” to JavaScript, it seemed to become the most popular keyword in the language overnight, just comical amounts of it in the average new JavaScript file in the wild.
Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
#10Use an appropriate language and runtime for the right tool/workload. There's better languages and runtimes to use that have better native concurrency built in.