[craigyk]

Yeah, if you're going to have to do async to be performant than it better be pretty pervasive throughout all the libraries. Bonus points if the language supports syntax to make async easier as well. Node is beating out Python for server stuff not simply because it is "async", but because it is so much FASTER. The speed of V8 vs. CPython is a big part of that. In fact, vanilla JS doesn't have much to make async programming particularly easy: it has verbose function declaration and no yield mechanisms. Even library-level solutions like promises are merely 'OK'.

Still, it is easier to build a fast server that can handle streams in Node than it is in Python. Async Python? I'll just stick to async JS in that case.

[rdtsc]

I think there is another issue here. Python world has watched as Node.js has been eating its lunch on the server side and they decided, ah, surely that is because Node.js has async, if we add that too, everyone will love Python again and come crawling back. They are not saying, I think that is written between the lines.

Except one thing, as you pointed out, people use Node.js -- 1) it is JS 2) V8 is fast.

[nashequilibrium]

The reason why you getting so many downvotes is because your comment is not just silly but flat wrong. Twisted, Tornado were around before nodejs. There are also async frameworks that make writing async code the same as synchronous code. I like tornado but I am using nodejs for my current app because of the libraries. This is where nodejs really shines, the community and libraries are awesome. Twisted has a lot of libraries but it has so much going on that many developers find it too complex. Tornado is a much simpler async framework to adapt to and allows you to run twisted libraries.

Twisted's inlinecallback's and tornado's gen module gets rid of all the async spaghetti code. This is hard to do with nodejs but I still chose nodejs because the available libraries made my project quicker to develop.

[rdtsc]

Sorry I didn't express myself correctly (see my reply to akuchling below).

Basically yes, Python had Twisted for years, it had Diesel, Monocle, Tornado, and some other ones. I am aware of those and as you've read my comment you saw that I used Twisted enough to know its ins and outs (5 years).

> There are also async frameworks that make writing async code the same as synchronous code.

Yes there is inlineCallbacks and I used. Node.js also has async (https://github.com/caolan/async). But you don't address the main problem that I raised -- fragmentation of libraries. Python is great because it comes with batteries, and then you can find even more batteries everywhere, _except_ if you use an async framework like Twisted, which, percolates all the way through you API code. Once your socket.recv() returns a Deferred(), that deferred will bubble up all the way to the user interface. So you now you end up searching or recreating a parallel set of libraries.

> Twisted has a lot of libraries but it has so much going on that many developers find it too complex.

It is too complex with too many libraries for those who want to take it up but it is not complex and doesn't have enough libraries if you are in it already -- every library you use has to be Twisted now. That's the danger of inventing a new framework.

Yes it will be standard, but there is already a practical standard -- eventlet and gevent. This is somethin Node.js doesn't have. I will personally take monkey-patching and the danger that my function will context switch inside while doing IO over using Twisted. I saw a practical benefit from it at least.

[cpprototypes]

I have a question for you since you have a lot of experience with async. Eventually node.js will have generators (when V8 implements ECMAScript 6) which should allow node.js to have something like gevent. What kind of effect do you think this will have on the node.js world?

[rdtsc]

If it has generators it will make it easier. I remember being happy about finding out Twisted has inlineCallbacks. I basically let you not have to split your logical function into multiple functions simply because it has to to do some IO.

Before it used to be code like:

    def processShoppingCart(...):
       d.addCallback(_cb1)
       return d # (d is a Deferred)

   def _cb1(...):
      d2.addCallback(_cb2)
      return d2 # d2 is a another Deferred

etc.

Which with generators and inlineCallbacks turns into

    @someDecoratorThatEnableUsingInlineCallbacks
    def processShoppingCart(...):
       .. do some work ..
       yield <some_io_function_like_check_db>
       .. do some more work ..
       yield <some_io_other_io_function>
       ....

You get the idea. I am not too familiar with Node.js but I imagine it will help quite a bit.

[fzzzy]

I'm really looking forward to that future. See for example task.js:

  http://taskjs.org/

Also, if you want to see generators in v8 (spidermonkey has had them for years now) watch the issue:

  https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2355

[akuchling]

People have been writing async apps in Python since 1995 (Medusa); Twisted was first published around 2001. It's not like async programming is new to Python.

[rdtsc]

Sorry I didn't say it correctly, I meant that it seems the renewed interest in async is stemming from watching Node.js get all the attention.

I have been using Twisted for 5 years full time and have also used eventlet and gevent. From talking to others, I have found few who enjoyed or loved Twisted. It was pretty much the only sane way to do concurrent, performant IO for a while. But then when green thread approach came about, I had never looked back.

All was well. Then one day Node.js showed up, and it seems it has started to eat Python's lunch -- fast, scripted development on the server side, with some reasonable concurrency. And it was faster too.

Python devs looked at it and couldn't believe their eyes. And I speculate many have concluded it was because everyone was in love with a callback based async IO paradigm. So that's my guess why we are seeing this proposal.