Python asyncio is actually a co-operative multitasking system, think real-time operating system type stuff. It doesn't do real concurrency but it gives you a ni

Python asyncio is actually a co-operative multitasking system, think real-time operating system type stuff. It doesn't do real concurrency but it gives you a nice interface for reasoning about tasks (think thread) while being able to explicitly control when/where they yield control of the event loop, how often they run, etc. >How are your message queues not doing I/O? We generally wouldn't consider in-process moving data around to be "I/O", now if you started interacting with an external database/file/pipe/MMAP-ed-file/etc than that would be "I/O". >What on Earth are they doing then? Tasks. Kind of like processes but lighter weight. Running an event loop, dispatching signals, that sort of thing. You can do all that by manually writing your own event loop but python's asyncio (IMO) makes it easier to reason about exactly when your yielding the event loop to some other task, and makes it easier to write code that can yield control of the event loop at arbitrary places. So like if you want to update a widget every 10 seconds you can write something like while True: await asyncio.sleep(10) #Other tasks can run during this 10 seconds sleep #Update widget contents Useful for stuff that needs to periodically poll data, like a process monitor, or even for just simple clock widgets. --- As an aside that cooperative multitasking can be really nice in micropython, where you can write tight loops in straight assembly if you need to and still get a pleasant task interface for managing higher level tasks/threads. Combined with some interrupt handlers it makes a pretty elegant real-time-ish operating system. (You probably need to manually deal with garbage collections though)