His criticism of asyncore/asynchat and simplehttpserver is clear: try to do anything nontrivial and immediately you hit barriers. Twisted, albeit a monstrosity, can get around most of those deficiencies.
When I tried using async{hat,ore} I came across a few pitfalls:
- the async* library is not thread safe: loop and poll* both use a global socket_map (read the code to see what I'm saying -- on my mac its at /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/asyncore.py)
- There's no way to integrate timers in the loop (there are constructs like timerfd in linux to get around this deficiency in the linux C api)
That being said, IRC bots (more generally, simple chat applications) are the type of application perfectly suited for asyncore, and I'm pretty sure someone has written a tutorial on it using an IRC bot as the goal.
What is meant by "timers"? Something like "execute this function in 5 minutes"?
My bot [0] has an idle function, which is called every 30 seconds and does background jobs like checking git repos for new commits. The 30 seconds are the timeout of the select/poll call asyncore does internally, which can of course be changed. Based on this the bot got a cron-like timing infrastructure.