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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: 0.199s | 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. leecarraher ◴[02 Sep 25 21:13 UTC] No.45109142[source]▶
i agree, also add to that, that many python modules are foss projects that are maintained on a limited basis or budget. Refactoring code that may have some unsafe async routines would be costly for an org, and dreadful for recreation. So you can either have a rich library of modules, or go async and risk something you need not working then having to find a workaround. Personally, if parallelism is important enough, i use ctypes and openmp. If i need something more portable, i have a few multiprocessing wrappers that implement prange and a few other widgets for shared memory.