[p5a0u9l]

The mess more reflects supporting a programmatic interface to processes in a cross platform manner, coupled with the actual complexity of parallel processing.

You didn’t mention the recommended high level option for subprocess, ‘subprocess. run’.

[cle]

Sure that exists too, but it blocks on process exit. I suppose I can run that in a separate thread but now I've got another dimension of complexity to deal with, and it's unclear if I can stream output from the subprocess?

There are other things I didn't mention that get thrown around too such as os.system() and os.fork().

[p5a0u9l]

For my use cases the asyncio wrapper makes it really easy to stack up a bunch of tasks, let the OS it’s thing, and then collect the results when they’re ready.

[hot_gril]

Other high-level languages do a better job with this.