Asyncio -- delayed calculation

[Marko Rauhamaa]

"Frank Millman" <frank at chagford.com>:
> Then Twisted made a strong case for an asynchronous approach. One of
> their claims (which I have no reason to doubt) was that, because each
> user 'session' spends most of its time waiting for something -
> keyboard input, reply from database, etc - their approach allows
> hundreds of concurrent users, something that I believe would not be
> possible with threading or multi-processing.

You don't need asyncio to do event-driven programming in Python. I have
programmed several event-driven applications in Python (and even more of
them in other languages) without using asyncio (you only need
select.epoll()).

My favorite model is the so-called "callback hell" with explicit finite
state machines. That tried-and-true model has always been used with
parallel, concurrent and network programming as well as user-interface
programming. Your code should closely resemble this:

   <URL: http://www.bayfronttechnologies.com/capesdl.gif>


Multiprocessing is also an important tool for compartmentalizing and
parallelizing functionality. Threads are mainly suitable for turning
obnoxious blocking APIs into nonblocking ones, but even there, I would
prefer to give that job to separate processes.


Marko