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that is interesting - does Gevent not give this in python (or twisted) ?

It does. I execute many db and filesystem queries in parallel with single threaded Python using gevent.

I'm not quite sure whether dropbox didn't or couldn't get gevent or a similar system to work - it's fairly straightforward.

I'm a huge fan of Python and gevent, and not the biggest fan of Go, but there's something to be said about built-in concurrency constructs like goroutines compared to something quite hacky like gevent (gevent.monkey.patch_all() everywhere). gevent is my favorite async networking library for Python, and I use it in almost all of my projects, but one can't deny it's basically one giant hack over CPython.

I agree that gevent is a hack. however goroutines correspond to greenlets rather than gevent. You could write clean asynchronous io libraries in python using just greenlets and then it's not a hack.

I wonder if dropbox evaluated this option or just rejected python outright.

True, but the API for pure Greenlets is a bit ugly.

In Go, the API for goroutines and channels is superb, concise, and clear.

For me, the negative traits of Go outweigh the positive, but I really wish other languages would adapt some of its concurrency constructs as native language features.

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