Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

sandGorgon

What's missing in asyncio when compared to gevent ?

The coroutine and queue model is the same right ?

Cool thing in 3.8:

Running python -m asyncio launches a natively async REPL.

View on HN

They're just completely different models. gevent is green threads, asyncio is explicit coroutines. In gevent, you don't use an "async" or "await" syntax. You just spawn greenlets (green threads), which run in the background, and if you want, you can have them block until they return a result. And they're efficient, so you can spawn thousands without a problem.

I always considered "green threads" and "coroutines" to be the same thing? Are they not?

The difference is that with coroutines, yielding is explicit. Tight-looping will hog the CPU, and a blocking call will block other coroutines too. Typically "green threads" are semantically just threads but cheaper. They're scheduled independently, so there's no risk of them hogging the CPU, and you can use synchronous apis. The one downside is that you need explicit synchronization between them, whereas with coroutines you can mutate shared data structures and not worry about race conditions as long as you don't yield in between.

They are both built on the same technology in the CPython runtime.

If you have a significant python code base that is not async, then all of that need to be ported to support async model where as with gevent I can do monkey patching and move to concurrency model. If I am starting a fresh project with python and need concurrency, yes "async" is a better choice, but if you already have some code base then moving to async is a fair amount of work.

With asyncio, your whole app falls over if you accidentally call a library function that makes a sync API call under the covers. gevent (as I understand it; haven't actually used it) will patch all sync APIs and make them async. Also, if you do `aiohttp.get("www.example.com/foo.json").json()", you get a TypeError because coroutine has no method '.json()' (you forgot `await`) unless you're using Mypy.

Yep, that about sums it up. gevent can't monkeypatch synchronous code that's implemented in non-Python native modules, but I think pretty much all native Python libraries struggle with those sorts of things, and asyncio of course also can't deal with it.

The vast majority of the time, gevent's monkeypatching works without any issues. With asyncio, you basically have to rewrite everything from the ground up to always use the new async APIs, and you can't interact with libraries that do sync I/O.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com