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>Coroutines have been a concept for...well a long time: ... Green threads also have been around for a while. What web frameworks were built around using them?

>Coroutines have been a concept for...well a long time: ... Green threads also have been around for a while. What web frameworks were built around using them? Was there a good ecosystem of libraries that were easy to use with the web framework without introducing blocking I/O? >I am not sure how you can say this while using Python as an example. Python has the GIL which, typically viewed as a limitation, actually prevents the situation your assertion suggests. In fact, one of the largest barriers to removing the GIL is the wealth of libraries and C-extensions to Python that implicitly rely on the thread safety guarantees/limitations of the GIL (as covered by Larry Hastings as part of his first Gilectomy talk). Aren't all python threads backed by OS threads? And pointing out that threading has been used by too many Python libraries to change supports the previous comment's assertion that non-blocking I/O was hard to use exclusively in languages like Python because too many libraries used blocking I/O. >Edit: Heck, NGINX was an asynchronous, event driven web engine released in 2004 and written in C: Nginx is pretty specialized. Not really sure it's useful to compare it to a programming language / web framework with an ecosystem of compatible libraries like PHP, Ruby on Rails, django, nodejs, etc.

btown 9y ago
I often wonder why Python's gevent didn't become more popular. It would monkey patch the socket libraries to yield to an event loop, allowing you to magically use blocking code and libraries with practically zero code changes, and zero callback hell. I imagine it had to do with marketing - when Node was released, everyone thought the spaghetti horror that was Twisted was the only other event-loop-based game in town. Ironically, now that we have async/await to replace nested callbacks, Node finally has the code readability that gevent users took for granted all this time.
- bastawhiz 9y ago
  > I often wonder why Python's gevent didn't become more popular. Quite honestly, it wasn't very good. It worked magically until the magic ran out. Mysterious breakages caused by stuff deep in gevent interacting badly with other libraries hampered my ability to use it effectively. For instance, you couldn't use it with python-requests directly, you need to use another library that makes requests compatible, unless you roll your own magic, which was often very complicated. And, at least in my experience, gevent stuff tends not to work with Python 3. Now that asyncio is a thing, I'm glad I never have to debug gevent-related problems anymore.

btown 9y ago

I often wonder why Python's gevent didn't become more popular. It would monkey patch the socket libraries to yield to an event loop, allowing you to magically use blocking code and libraries with practically zero code changes, and zero callback hell. I imagine it had to do with marketing - when Node was released, everyone thought the spaghetti horror that was Twisted was the only other event-loop-based game in town. Ironically, now that we have async/await to replace nested callbacks, Node finally has the code readability that gevent users took for granted all this time.

bastawhiz 9y ago
> I often wonder why Python's gevent didn't become more popular. Quite honestly, it wasn't very good. It worked magically until the magic ran out. Mysterious breakages caused by stuff deep in gevent interacting badly with other libraries hampered my ability to use it effectively. For instance, you couldn't use it with python-requests directly, you need to use another library that makes requests compatible, unless you roll your own magic, which was often very complicated. And, at least in my experience, gevent stuff tends not to work with Python 3. Now that asyncio is a thing, I'm glad I never have to debug gevent-related problems anymore.