Benefits of asyncio

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:

> your throughput is defined by your database.

Asyncio is not (primarily) a throughput-optimization method. Sometimes
it is a resource consumption optimization method as the context objects
are lighter-weight than full-blown threads.

Mostly asyncio is a way to deal with anything you throw at it. What do
you do if you need to exit the application immediately and your threads
are stuck in a 2-minute timeout? With asyncio, you have full control of
the situation.

> It's the same with all sorts of other resources. What happens if your
> error logging blocks? Do you code everything, *absolutely everything*,
> around callbacks? Because ultimately, it adds piles and piles of
> complexity and inefficiency, and it still comes back to the same
> thing: stuff can make other stuff wait.

It would be interesting to have an OS or a programming language where no
function returns a value. Linux, in particular, suffers from the
deeply-ingrained system assumption that all file access is synchronous.

However, your protestations seem like a straw man to me. I have really
been practicing event-driven programming for decades. It is fraught with
frustrating complications but they feel like fresh air compared with the
what-now moments I've had to deal with doing multithreaded programming.


Marko