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Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

tonybaloney.github.io

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Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#31

Post by acdha »

tdumitrescu wrote: post #22
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

I 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 servi…

That's the main problem with evented servers in general isn't it? If any one of your workloads is cpu-intensive, it has the potential to block the serving of everything else on the same thread, so requests that should always be snappy can end up taking randomly long times in practice. Basically if you have any cpu-heavy work, it shouldn't go in that same server.

Indeed. async is one of those things which makes a big difference in a handful of scenarios but which got promoted as a best-practice for everything. Python developers have simply joined Node and Go developers in learning that it’s not magic “go faster” spray and reasoning about things like peak memory load or shared resource management can be harder.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#32

Post by lstodd »

idk stackless dates back to 2005 at least, most likely earlier.

greenlet which is sort of minimal stackless .. before 2008

pycoev which is on one hand greenlets without memmove()s, on the other hand sort of io-scheduled m:n threading I wrote myself in 2009.

so, at least idk, 20 years?

It was first needed. Then 10 years passed, people got around to pushing it through the process aaand by the time it was done it was already not needed. so it all stalled. Same with Rust.

Nowadays server-side async is handled very differently. And client-side is dominated by that abomination called JS.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#33

Post by ddorian43 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #14

The author gets close to what I think the root problem is, but doesn't call it out. The truth is that in python, async was too little, too late. By the time it was introduced, most people who actually needed to do lots of io concurrently had their own workarounds (forking, etc) and people who didn't actually need it had found out how to get by without it (multiprocessing etc). Meanwhile, go showed us what good green…

Because it sucks compared to gevent (green threads). But for some reason, people always disregard this option. They don't even read it. Like any comment with gevent is shadowbanned and it doesn't register in their mind.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#34

Post by parhamn »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #14

The author gets close to what I think the root problem is, but doesn't call it out. The truth is that in python, async was too little, too late. By the time it was introduced, most people who actually needed to do lots of io concurrently had their own workarounds (forking, etc) and people who didn't actually need it had found out how to get by without it (multiprocessing etc). Meanwhile, go showed us what good green…

pair this with needing async in depth and that's exactly it. The whole network stack needs to be async-first and all the popular networking libraries need to have been built on that. Many of those libraries are already C-extension based and don't jibe well with the newer python parts in any way.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#36

Post by dragonwriter »

baq wrote: post #6

async, 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…

> async, parallelism, concurrency, why not all three?

async is a concurrency mechanism.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#37

Post by mjd »

I haven't read the article yet, but I do have something to contribute: several years ago I was ay PyCon and saw a talk in which someone mentioned async. I was interested and wanted to learn to use it. But I found there was no documentation at all! The syntax was briefly described, but not the semantics.

I realized, years later, that the (non-)documentation was directed at people who were already familiar with the feature from Javascript. But I hadn't been familiar with it from Javascript and I didn't even know that Javascript had had such a feature.

So that's my tiny contribution to this discussion, one data point: Python's async might have been one unit more popular if it had had any documentation, or even a crossreference to the Javascript documentation.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#39

Post by ilaksh »

There is a fundamental misunderstanding about popularity. People think that popularity is directly related to merit or rationality.

Technical things are largely popular for the same reason non-technical things are popular: trends. In other words, they are popular because other people perceive them to be popular. Humans are herd animals.

async is harder and associated with Node.js/JavaScript which probably makes it uncool for a certain influential python subculture.

But actually Fast API has basically taken over and now I think people should recognize that means async IS popular in python at this point.

Re: Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?

#40

Post by aquariusDue »

tschellenbach wrote: post #11

Yes, this!. Its a mess, some typing, some async. No standardization/ one way to do things. Literally goes against the original ZEN of python "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it : Aim for a single, clear solution to a problem. "

Cue the zen of python apologists explaining how we just don't get it and that with enough reframing it'll click.

Snide remark aside, I actually like the Zen of Python as programming language folklore but in 2025 AD it's kinda crazy to pretend that Python actually adheres to those tenets or whatever you wish to call them, and I'd go as far as to claim that it does a disservice to a language flexible enough for a lot of use cases. There's even someone on YouTube developing a VR game with Python.

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