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I don't know what you use Python for every day. Sure for some utility scripts it doesn't matter. I use it to run my ecommerce business, and for a variety of o

I don't know what you use Python for every day. Sure for some utility scripts it doesn't matter. I use it to run my ecommerce business, and for a variety of other plumbing, mostly for passing messages around between users, APIs, databases, printers, etc. Async programming is a must for just about everything. I guess the alternative would be thread pools, or process pools, like back in the day; but that has a lot of downsides. It is slower, way more resource intensive, and state sharing/synchronization becomes a major issue, you can only handle thread number of tasks concurrently and you're going to use that memory all the time; not to mention all the code needs to be thread safe. Most of our systems use gevent, but we've starting using asyncio for new projects.

samwillis 4y ago
Same as you, e-commerce store, along with other mostly web projects, quite a bit of real-time and long running requests. I also use Gevent extensively (I prefer it to asyncio). We use Gevent or Asyncio in a small number of routes that either have long running requests, SSE in our case, or have a very large number of rear facing io requests we can parallelise (a few back office screens and processes). The complexity that asyncio would add to the the code for the 95% of routs that don't need it would add a lot of unnecessary overhead to development. My point is, I don't believe it adds any value 95% of the time, but does, sometimes significantly, 5% of the time. I think it's better to only use it where it's really needed and stick to old fashioned, none concurrent, code everywhere else.
- jacob019 4y ago
  Ok, I can agree with that. Gevent doesn't really add any cognitive overhead or complexity at all. Asyncio sure does, and makes the code hard to read too. Long ago I settled on a stack that includes using gevent for anything that listens on a socket, never regretted it.

samwillis 4y ago

Same as you, e-commerce store, along with other mostly web projects, quite a bit of real-time and long running requests. I also use Gevent extensively (I prefer it to asyncio). We use Gevent or Asyncio in a small number of routes that either have long running requests, SSE in our case, or have a very large number of rear facing io requests we can parallelise (a few back office screens and processes). The complexity that asyncio would add to the the code for the 95% of routs that don't need it would add a lot of unnecessary overhead to development. My point is, I don't believe it adds any value 95% of the time, but does, sometimes significantly, 5% of the time. I think it's better to only use it where it's really needed and stick to old fashioned, none concurrent, code everywhere else.

jacob019 4y ago
Ok, I can agree with that. Gevent doesn't really add any cognitive overhead or complexity at all. Asyncio sure does, and makes the code hard to read too. Long ago I settled on a stack that includes using gevent for anything that listens on a socket, never regretted it.