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>Everyone reads the docs? The author goes on to say they found this pattern lurking in various projects on github. So, no. The problem is that this behavior is

>Everyone reads the docs? The author goes on to say they found this pattern lurking in various projects on github. So, no. The problem is that this behavior is subtle, not intuitive, and unless you are reading the actual documentation top to bottom (and not just the function signature and first paragraph from the pop up in your IDE) you will likely get bitten by this. What is the point of your comment? The author shouldn't have called out the upturned rake in the darkened shed?

rollcat 4y ago
> The author goes on to say they found this pattern lurking in various projects on github. I'd call it an anti-pattern. If you spawn a process/thread, and never wait/join it, it means you don't actually care what it does, if it crashes, etc. I don't see a problem with Python's behavior here.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Seriously?? I think the vast majority of developers would find it very surprising that the Python runtime would GC a task in the middle of execution. I would expect that the runtime would by default do what the example in the doc says, which is keep a strong reference to the Task object until it finished execution.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  The chances are that most people doing this are introducing some nondeterminism that they did not expect, and will have a hard time dealing with it when it bites them in the ass. What's more to the point is that I am going to have a hard time when it leads to a serious outage or security violation at some major corporation that has become too pervasive in its reach for me to avoid its influence. No amount of schadenfreude is going to compensate for that.
aeturnum 4y ago
I wouldn't say shouldn't - they are free to do what they want. But this is a blog post about something that can trip you up that the docs highlight - which the author calls a "heisenbug". The author doesn't even have a suggestion for the docs, which already calls out the problem they encountered, they just note that there are helpers for this problem (which is true). The point of my comment is that subtle, non intuitive things like this are all over Python and, while this one is particularly bad, this blog post makes it seem like more of an aberration than it is.

rollcat 4y ago

> The author goes on to say they found this pattern lurking in various projects on github. I'd call it an anti-pattern. If you spawn a process/thread, and never wait/join it, it means you don't actually care what it does, if it crashes, etc. I don't see a problem with Python's behavior here.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Seriously?? I think the vast majority of developers would find it very surprising that the Python runtime would GC a task in the middle of execution. I would expect that the runtime would by default do what the example in the doc says, which is keep a strong reference to the Task object until it finished execution.
mannykannot 4y ago
The chances are that most people doing this are introducing some nondeterminism that they did not expect, and will have a hard time dealing with it when it bites them in the ass. What's more to the point is that I am going to have a hard time when it leads to a serious outage or security violation at some major corporation that has become too pervasive in its reach for me to avoid its influence. No amount of schadenfreude is going to compensate for that.

aeturnum 4y ago

I wouldn't say shouldn't - they are free to do what they want. But this is a blog post about something that can trip you up that the docs highlight - which the author calls a "heisenbug". The author doesn't even have a suggestion for the docs, which already calls out the problem they encountered, they just note that there are helpers for this problem (which is true). The point of my comment is that subtle, non intuitive things like this are all over Python and, while this one is particularly bad, this blog post makes it seem like more of an aberration than it is.