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

(tonybaloney.github.io)
320 points willm | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 17:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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atomicnumber3 ◴[02 Sep 25 17:41 UTC] No.45106455[source]▶
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 threads can look like. Then java did it too. Meanwhile, js had better async support the whole time. But all it did was show us that async code just plain sucks compared to green thread code that can just block, instead of having to do the async dances.

So, why engage with it when you already had good solutions?

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1. gen220 ◴[02 Sep 25 18:01 UTC] No.45106758[source]▶
As somebody who's written and maintained a good bit of Python in prod and recently a good amount of server-side typescript... this would be my answer.

I'd add one other aspect that we sort of take for granted these days, but affordable multi-threaded CPUs have really taken off in the last 10 years.

Not only does the stack based on green-threads "just work" without coloring your codebase with async/no-async, it allows you to scale a single compute instance gracefully to 1 instance with N vCPUs vs N pods of 2-vCPU instances.