What's the advantage over using Flask's built-in support for async described here? https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/async-await/
This is an honest question; I don't know much about python async yet.
This is an honest question; I don't know much about python async yet.
To me the biggest advantage of FastAPI is the excellent integration with type hinting. It permeates the entire framework and makes things really productive.
When I saw how you could use Pydantic models to define the schema of your request and response body, and then have that autogenerated into documentation - there was no going back. https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/body/
But I would like to stress that, though it has displaced Flask in my workflow, I think of FastAPI as a spiritual successor to Flask, and would never say an ill word about Flask.
And I do miss having such industrial grade documentation for my framework. I miss it real bad.
With a proper async framework, you will keep accepting all the requests as they come -- a single node can take thousands of those requests and time out on them gracefully, as they are just lightweight entries in the event loop, and you can have lots of those compared to # of worker threads.
Of course, fully async framework requires all your code to be fully async, which in practice means minimizing the # of dependencies since its hard to trust them. And problems with SDKs, like for instance on GCP where Google keeps lacking async support (!) for most of their things. So with the "hybrid" async you get from Flask you can still choose to use sync code for some things and async for others.