I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio. These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some principles for designing event loop APIs and asynchronous libraries in Python. This is a quickly changing area and the ideas here are very much still under development, so this text probably assumes all kinds of background knowledge and possibly that you live inside my head – but maybe you'll find it interesting anyway. I'd love to hear what you think or discuss further.

[Update, 2017-03-10: While the text below focuses on Curio, most of the commentary also applies to Trio, which is my new Curio-like library that came out of this blog post.]

The curious effectiveness of curio So here's the tentative conclusion that spurred this essay, and which surprised the heck out of me: the more I work with curio, the more plausible it seems that in a few years, asyncio might find itself relegated to becoming one of those stdlib libraries that savvy developers avoid, like urllib2. I'm not saying that the library we'll all be using instead will necessarily be curio, or that asyncio can't possibly find some way to adapt and avoid this fate, or that you should go switch to curio right now – the practicalities of choosing a library are complicated. Let me put it in bold: This is not an essay about curio versus asyncio and which one is "the best". I'll talk a lot about those two libraries, but for present purposes I'm profoundly uninterested in things like which one wins at such-and-such microbenchmark as of which-ever latest release, and I don't have any personal investment in either. The reason I talk about them is because they make good illustrative examples of two very different design strategies. The goal of this essay is to understand the trade-offs between the "curio-style" design strategy versus the "asyncio-style" design strategy. So first, I'll try to articulate a conceptual framework for understanding what these two strategies actually are, and how they differ – this is something I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. Then to make that more concrete, I'll walk through some concrete examples using the two libraries, and see how these underlying design decisions play out in specific real world use cases. It turns out that in these examples, the "curio-style" produces better results; I'll try to pull out the general principles that explain why this happens, and that might give us hints on how to design or improve new APIs for both event loops and for the libraries that use them. Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I come to is that it's hard to see how these advantages could be "retrofitted" to asyncio – but I could be wrong, and at least once we understand them we can have a conversation about how to make Python's async I/O ecosystem as awesome as possible, whatever that ends up looking like; I'll conclude by sketching out some possible directions this could go.

Callback soup considered harmful The basic difference between asyncio and curio comes down to their attitude towards Python 3.5's new async/await syntax. But before we talk about the best way to use async/await, lets digress to talk about why async/await even matters. ...Actually I'm going to digress even more then that. Let's start by talking about what programming languages are for. It's easy to forget sometimes just how much work a modern language like Python does to guide and constrain how you put together a program. Like, just for the most basic example, consider how simply juxtaposing two statements f(); g() expresses ordering: you know that g won't start executing until f has finished. Another example – the call stack tracks relationships between callers and callees, allowing us to decompose our program into loosely-coupled subroutines: a function doesn't need to keep track of who called it, it can just say return to fire a value into the void, and the language runtime makes some magic happen so the value and the control flow are delivered simultaneously to the right place. Exception handling defines a systematic, structured way to unwind these decoupled subroutines when something goes wrong; if you think about it this trick of taking the call stack and reusing it as the unwind stack is really quite clever. with blocks build on that by giving us an ergonomic way to pin the lifetime of resources – file handles and so forth – to the dynamic lifetime of these call stacks. Iterators track the state needed to bind control flow to the shape of data. These tools are so fundamental that they disappear into the background – when we're typing out code we don't usually stop to think about all the wacky ways that things could be done differently. Yet these all had to be invented. In functional languages, f(); g() doesn't express ordering. Back in the 1970s, the idea of limiting yourself to using just function calls, loops, and if statements – goto 's hamstrung siblings – was *incredibly controversial*. There are great living languages that disagree with Python about lots of the points above. But Python's particular toolkit has been refined over decades, and fits together to provide a powerful scaffolding for structuring our code. ...until you want to do some asynchronous I/O. The traditional way to do this is to have an event loop and use callback-based programming: the event loop keeps a big table of future events that you want to respond to when they happen (e.g., "this socket became readable", "that timer expired"), and for each event you have a corresponding callback. The event loop takes care of checking for events and invoking callbacks, but if you want structure beyond that – like the kind of things we just discussed above: causal sequencing, delegation to and return from subroutines, error unwinding, resource cleanup, iteration – then you get to build that yourself. You can do it, just like you can use goto to build loops and function calls. Frameworks like Twisted and its descendents have invented all kinds of useful strategies for keeping these callbacks organized, like protocols and deferreds / futures and even some kind of exception handling – but these are still a pretty thin layer of structure on top of the underlying unstructured callback soup, and from the perspective of regular Python they're like some other mutant alternative programming language. That's why PEP 492 and async/await are so exciting: they let us take Python's regular toolkit for solving these problems, and start using it in asynchronous code. Which is awesome, because frankly, Twisted, I love you and deferreds are pretty cool, but as abstract languages for describing computation go then real-actual-Python is wayyy better. And with that background, then, I think I can articulate the key difference between asyncio-style event-loop APIs and curio-style event-loop APIs: Asyncio is first and foremost a traditional callback-based API, with async/await layered on top as a supplementary tool. And if you're starting from a callback-oriented base, then this is a great addition: async/await provide a major boost in usability without disrupting the basic framework. Asyncio is what we might call a "hybrid" system: callbacks plus async/await. Curio takes this a step further, and throws out the callback API altogether; it's async/await all the way down. Specifically, it still has an event loop, but instead of managing arbitrary callbacks, it manages async functions; there's exactly one way it can respond when an event fires, and that's by resuming an async call-stack. I'll call this the "async/await-native" approach. The main point I want to argue in this essay – the point of all the examples below – is that if you're using a hybrid API like asyncio, then you can ignore the callback API and write structured async/await code. But, even if you stick to async/await everywhere, the underlying abstractions are leaky, so don't get the full advantages. Your async/await functions are dumplings of local structure floating on top of callback soup, and this has far-reaching implications for the simplicity and correctness of your code. Python's structuring tools were designed to fit together as a system – e.g., exception handling relies on the call stack, and with blocks rely on exception handling – and if you have a mix of structured and unstructured parts, then this creates lots of unnecessary problems, even if you stick to the structured async/await layer of the library. In a curio-style async/await-native API, by contrast, your whole program uses this one consistent set of structuring principles, and this consistency – it turns out – has pervasive benefits. What I'm arguing, in effect, is that asyncio is a victim of its own success: when it was designed, it used the best approach possible; but since then, work inspired by asyncio – like the addition of async/await – has shifted the landscape so that we can do even better, and now asyncio is hamstrung by its earlier commitments. To make that more specific, let's look at some concrete examples.

Example: a simple proxy server For our main example, I'll take a simple proxy server, equivalent to socat -u TCP-LISTEN:$LOCAL_PORT TCP:$REMOTE_HOST:$REMOTE_PORT . Specifically, given a local port, a remote host, and a remote port, we want to: Listen for connections on the local port. Accept a single connection. Make a connection to the remote host + port. Copy data from the local port to the remote port. (One way only, to keep things simple.) Exit after all the data has been copied. In addition, I'll follow these rules, to the best of my ability: Readability counts: I'll write each version in as elegant a manner as I can.

No cheating: Since this is a toy one-off program, there are things we could get away with that wouldn't fly if this were real, reusable library code – like using global variables, or leaving open sockets dangling to be cleaned up by the kernel when our program exits. To make this more representative of real code, I'll hold myself to those higher standards. Three examples Example #1: asyncio, with callbacks Let's start by showing what this looks like using a traditional callback approach. (The two examples after this will demonstrate curio and asyncio's version of async/await-based APIs, which is what most people will want to use – this first example is to provide context for those.) I'll demonstrate with asyncio's "protocol" API, though the basic design here is inherited almost directly from the immensely influential Twisted (a Twisted version is also available for the curious). Here's the complete code, and then I'll give some commentary on how it works: Download source: asyncio-proxy-protocols.py 1 import sys 2 from functools import partial 3 import traceback 4 import asyncio 5 6 class OneWayProxySource ( asyncio . Protocol ): 7 def __init__ ( self , loop , server_task_container , dest_host , dest_port ): 8 self . loop = loop 9 self . server_task = server_task_container [ 0 ] 10 self . dest_host = dest_host 11 self . dest_port = dest_port 12 13 def connection_made ( self , transport ): 14 # Stop listening for new connections 15 self . server_task . cancel () 16 17 # Save our transport 18 self . transport = transport 19 20 # Disable reading until the destination is ready. 21 self . transport . pause_reading () 22 23 # Connect to the destination 24 self . dest_protocol = OneWayProxyDest ( self . loop , self . transport ) 25 coro = self . loop . create_connection ( lambda : self . dest_protocol , 26 self . dest_host , self . dest_port ) 27 task = self . loop . create_task ( coro ) 28 def connection_check_for_failure ( fut ): 29 exc = fut . exception () 30 if exc is not None : 31 print ( "Failed to connect:" ) 32 # This isn't really right -- it doesn't handle exception 33 # chaining etc. I lack the will to worry about it. 34 traceback . print_tb ( exc . __traceback__ ) 35 self . transport . abort () 36 self . loop . stop () 37 task . add_done_callback ( connection_check_for_failure ) 38 39 def data_received ( self , data ): 40 self . dest_protocol . send_data ( data ) 41 42 def connection_lost ( self , exc ): 43 self . dest_protocol . close () 44 45 class OneWayProxyDest ( asyncio . Protocol ): 46 def __init__ ( self , loop , source_transport ): 47 self . loop = loop 48 self . source_transport = source_transport 49 50 def connection_made ( self , transport ): 51 self . transport = transport 52 # Okay, now we're ready for data to start flowing 53 self . source_transport . resume_reading () 54 55 def send_data ( self , data ): 56 self . transport . write ( data ) 57 58 def close ( self ): 59 self . transport . write_eof () 60 61 def connection_lost ( self , exc ): 62 self . source_transport . abort () 63 self . loop . stop () 64 65 def main ( source_port , dest_host , dest_port ): 66 loop = asyncio . get_event_loop () 67 server_task_container = [] 68 coro = loop . create_server ( 69 lambda : OneWayProxySource ( loop , server_task_container , 70 dest_host , dest_port ), 71 "localhost" , source_port ) 72 server_task = loop . create_task ( coro ) 73 server_task_container . append ( server_task ) 74 loop . run_forever () 75 loop . close () 76 77 if __name__ == "__main__" : 78 try : 79 args = [ int ( sys . argv [ 1 ]), sys . argv [ 2 ], int ( sys . argv [ 3 ])] 80 except Exception : 81 print ( "Usage: {} SOURCE_PORT DEST_HOST DEST_PORT" . format ( __file__ )) 82 else : 83 main ( * args ) There's a lot going on here, and the details aren't that important; like I said, this is mostly here to provide context for the next two examples. As a rough outline to get the idea, though: OneWayProxySource manages the incoming connection. When a connection is made (line 13) it first does some bookkeeping, then starts the outgoing connection (lines 24-36). Then when incoming data is received, or the incoming connection is closed, it forwards that on to the outgoing connection (lines 38-42).

manages the incoming connection. When a connection is made (line 13) it first does some bookkeeping, then starts the outgoing connection (lines 24-36). Then when incoming data is received, or the incoming connection is closed, it forwards that on to the outgoing connection (lines 38-42). OneWayProxyDest manages the outgoing connection. In particular, it's responsible for actually sending data (lines 54-58), and shutting down the program once all the data has been sent (lines 60-61).

manages the outgoing connection. In particular, it's responsible for actually sending data (lines 54-58), and shutting down the program once all the data has been sent (lines 60-61). main has the job of setting up the listening socket and arranging for incoming connections to be allocated a OneWayProxySource object (lines 66-69).

has the job of setting up the listening socket and arranging for incoming connections to be allocated a object (lines 66-69). And then there's the usual if __name__ == __main__ boilerplate at the bottom. There's two main things I want to take away here: The control flow is not at all straightforward or easy to follow. All the actual reading and writing takes place "off-screen". By the time our data_received callback is run, someone else has already done the work of reading data off the network and into memory, and when we send data using self.transport.write , that doesn't actually do any sending. (How could it? Writing data takes time, and we aren't allowed to block.) Instead, what it does is queue the data to be sent later. This is also why we can't just shut down after calling self.transport.write_eof() – that just schedules the socket to be closed later, and we have to wait until OneWayProxyDest.connection_lost is called to let us know that the closure has actually happened. Example #2: curio, with async/await Now here's the equivalent program, but with curio. It looks very different, and I'll go through it in more detail: Download source: curio-proxy.py 1 import sys 2 from functools import partial 3 import curio 4 5 READ_SIZE = 20000 6 7 async def main ( source_port , dest_host , dest_port ): 8 main_task = await curio . current_task () 9 bound_cb = partial ( proxy , dest_host , dest_port , main_task ) 10 await curio . tcp_server ( "localhost" , source_port , bound_cb ) 11 12 async def proxy ( dest_host , dest_port , main_task , source_sock , addr ): 13 await main_task . cancel () 14 dest_sock = await curio . open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port ) 15 async with dest_sock : 16 await copy_all ( source_sock , dest_sock ) 17 18 async def copy_all ( source_sock , dest_sock ): 19 while True : 20 data = await source_sock . recv ( READ_SIZE ) 21 if not data : # EOF 22 return 23 await dest_sock . sendall ( data ) 24 25 if __name__ == "__main__" : 26 try : 27 args = [ int ( sys . argv [ 1 ]), sys . argv [ 2 ], int ( sys . argv [ 3 ])] 28 except Exception : 29 print ( "Usage: {} SOURCE_PORT DEST_HOST DEST_PORT" . format ( __file__ )) 30 else : 31 curio . run ( main ( * args )) First our main function sets up a listening socket, and arranges for the proxy function to be invoked on each incoming connection: Download source: curio-proxy.py 7 async def main ( source_port , dest_host , dest_port ): 8 main_task = await curio . current_task () 9 bound_cb = partial ( proxy , dest_host , dest_port , main_task ) 10 await curio . tcp_server ( "localhost" , source_port , bound_cb ) When a connection arrives, proxy first tells main to stop listening (line 13), since we only want to handle one connection. Then it sets up the outgoing connection (line 14), and invokes copy_all : Download source: curio-proxy.py 12 async def proxy ( dest_host , dest_port , main_task , source_sock , addr ): 13 await main_task . cancel () 14 dest_sock = await curio . open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port ) 15 async with dest_sock : 16 await copy_all ( source_sock , dest_sock ) And copy_all , finally, implements the core logic of a proxy: copying data from one socket to another in a loop: Download source: curio-proxy.py 18 async def copy_all ( source_sock , dest_sock ): 19 while True : 20 data = await source_sock . recv ( READ_SIZE ) 21 if not data : # EOF 22 return 23 await dest_sock . sendall ( data ) I hope we can all agree that in terms of readability, this is a huge improvement over the callback-based version. Ignoring imports and the __main__ boilerplate, we've gone from 67 lines of code down to 17 (four times shorter!), and the logic is now straightforward and procedural. Instead of having to manually check for everything that could go wrong and abort connections, we can just use with blocks and let exceptions propagate. That's the power of async/await. Example #3: asyncio, with async/await We can also write this example using asyncio's async/await-based "streams" API layer, and it looks very similar to the curio version: Download source: asyncio-proxy-streams.py 1 import sys 2 from functools import partial 3 from contextlib import closing 4 import asyncio 5 6 READ_SIZE = 20000 7 8 async def main ( loop , source_port , dest_host , dest_port ): 9 connect_event = asyncio . Event () 10 server_closed_event = asyncio . Event () 11 bound_cb = partial ( proxy , 12 loop , connect_event , server_done_event , 13 dest_host , dest_port ) 14 server = await asyncio . start_server ( bound_cb , "localhost" , source_port , 15 loop = loop ) 16 await connect_event . wait () 17 server . close () 18 await server . wait_closed () 19 server_done_event . set () 20 21 async def proxy ( loop , connect_event , server_closed_event , 22 dest_host , dest_port , 23 source_reader , source_writer ): 24 connect_event . set () 25 try : 26 with closing ( source_writer ): 27 tmp = await asyncio . open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port , loop = loop ) 28 dest_reader , dest_writer = tmp 29 with closing ( dest_writer ): 30 await copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ) 31 finally : 32 await server_done_event . wait () 33 loop . stop () 34 35 async def copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ): 36 while True : 37 data = await source_reader . read ( READ_SIZE ) 38 if not data : # EOF 39 return 40 dest_writer . write ( data ) 41 42 if __name__ == "__main__" : 43 try : 44 args = [ int ( sys . argv [ 1 ]), sys . argv [ 2 ], int ( sys . argv [ 3 ])] 45 except Exception : 46 print ( "Usage: {} SOURCE_PORT DEST_HOST DEST_PORT" . format ( __file__ )) 47 else : 48 loop = asyncio . get_event_loop () 49 loop . create_task ( main ( loop , * args )) 50 loop . run_forever () In particular, notice how the core copy_all function here is almost identical to the curio version, modulo some spelling adjustments like read versus recv . There is one source of extra complexity that ends up making the core logic here almost twice as long as in the curio version: the need to figure out when everything has completed so that the event loop can be safely shut down. In curio, the general rule is straightforward: the event loop exits when all (non-daemonic) tasks have finished. Here we have two tasks ( main and proxy ), so when they're both done, the loop exits. Asyncio doesn't provide any equivalent – we can use run_until_complete to run the loop until any one task exits, but this may leave arbitrary other tasks and callbacks unfinished. Instead, our two tasks have to manually coordinate to make sure that both have finished their work and cleaned up before we call loop.stop() , and this takes a bit of doing (lines 9-10, 16-19, 24, 32-33). There's also another difference that doesn't show up on the page: the curio code pretty much directly does what it says, e.g. await sock.recv initiates a read from the socket and suspends until it completes. The asyncio code, on the other hand, is written as a layer on top of the protocol/transport system we saw in the first example. Now you see why we needed that first example! In the asyncio code, even though it doesn't look like we're using protocols, there's still a data_received callback somewhere that's stashing data in an internal buffer where source_reader.read can find it, and when we call dest_writer.write that ultimately turns into a call to a transport.write method, which schedules the writing to happen off-screen. The idea is that this is something the end-user doesn't have to think about; unfortunately, as we'll see, it doesn't quite work out that way. And finally, there's one more extremely important difference between these examples: the asyncio protocols code has a showstopper bug. The asyncio async/await code has the same showstopper bug, plus a less important second bug... and a third, different, showstopper bug. Yet, remarkably, the curio code – despite being shorter and easier to understand – is correct as originally written. Three bugs Bug #1: backpressure This bug affects both of the asyncio examples, but not the curio example. Imagine that our example code is being used to proxy between two different networks that run at different speeds: data is arriving on the incoming socket at 3 MB/s, but the outgoing socket is only transmitting at 1 MB/s. What happens? Remember what we said about how transport.write doesn't actually send any data, but rather just adds it to a buffer to be sent later? With the two asyncio examples shown above, that's exactly what will happen: each second we'll add 3 MB of data to the buffer, while 1 MB are removed, so on net our buffer will grow by 2 MB/s second until we eventually wake the out-of-memory killer. Of course, we probably won't catch this in testing, so it'll make a nice 2 am surprise someday. And even if we don't actually run out of memory, we'll introduce potentially epic amounts of latency: after 10 seconds, we'll have accumulated 20 MB in our buffer, which means that a byte that arrives from the sender will sit in our process for 20 seconds before being forwarded on to the receiver; after 10 minutes, well... you get the idea. We are failing to apply backpressure, one of the cardinal sins of network programming. The elements of a distributed system can't function well if they aren't getting accurate feedback from their peers – and even just a single TCP connection is already a complex distributed system involving two userspaces, two kernel socket layers, two kernel packet layers, and who knows how many routers and competing flows. Backpressure is important. For the asyncio protocols-based implementation, this can be fixed through some judicious use of the flow control callbacks and flow control commands. I'll leave the details as an exercise for the reader, but basically we want to call pause_reading after each chunk is received, and then define a resume_writing callback that calls resume_reading . (The Twisted protocol implementation also has this bug, and can be fixed in a similar way, albeit using some essentially undocumented APIs; issues around backpressure seem to be a perennial challenge for Twisted.) For the asyncio streams-based implementation, StreamReader automatically uses the {pause,resume}_reading methods to transmit backpressure upstream, and StreamWriter provides a friendly wrapper around {pause,resume}_writing to help us accept backpressure from downstream: the drain method – we just have to remember to use it. So in order to fix our proxy to transmit backpressure, all we need to do is to add one line of code to copy_all . Specifically, this line: Download source: asyncio-proxy-streams-2.py 35 async def copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ): 36 while True : 37 await dest_writer . drain () 38 data = await source_reader . read ( READ_SIZE ) 39 if not data : # EOF 40 return In curio, things are different, because of the critical await that was already present: Download source: curio-proxy.py 18 async def copy_all ( source_sock , dest_sock ): 19 while True : 20 data = await source_sock . recv ( READ_SIZE ) 21 if not data : # EOF 22 return 23 await dest_sock . sendall ( data ) In curio, there are no hidden buffers – sendall doesn't return until the OS has accepted the data to be sent. This has the effect of automatically propagating backpressure, without our having to remember to do anything. Our original example worked because in curio, it would take actual effort to get this wrong. Bug #2: read-side buffering This bug mostly affects the asyncio + async/await example, somewhat affects the asyncio + callbacks example, and doesn't affect the curio example. We mentioned above how we should try to minimize buffering in order to keep latency down. Unfortunately, there's another source of extraneous buffering in the streams-based asyncio code, on the StreamReader side. The asyncio internals can be difficult to follow, but I believe that at a steady state with data coming in faster than it can be processed, on Unix-like system, the user-space buffer in StreamReader will oscillate between 128 KiB and 384 KiB. (I calculated this as 128 KiB = twice the _DEFAULT_LIMIT; 384 Kib = 128 KiB + 256 KiB.) For our proxy example, this is pretty bad – it's pure "bufferbloat", adding latency without adding any value. In our example with 1 MB/s outgoing bandwidth, this buffer adds an extra ~130-400 ms of steady-state latency for no good reason; on a slower connection (e.g. mobile) this could easily become multiple seconds. In the curio version, this problem doesn't arise, again because of curio's lack of userspace buffering: curio doesn't issue any recv syscalls until you actually call await sock.recv . This is really the right thing to do, because reading from a socket is (paradoxically!) a data transmitting action: after you call the recv syscall, the kernel will literally send out a packet to the remote peer asking them to send more data ("opening the receive window"). So you shouldn't call recv until you really are ready for more data, and you should always request exactly as much data as you're ready to process, no more. Curio makes this natural. As bugs go, StreamReader 's buffering is not as severe as the other two we discuss here – it won't cause crashes or data corruption, and receive-side backpressure isn't as universal a concern as send-side backpressure. (Everyone has to be prepared to handle a slow client, but perhaps some programs can process incoming data so quickly that they don't need to worry about fast clients.) Still, proxies are one place where this matters, and if we were seriously implementing some kind of proxy – like a SOCKS or HTTP proxy, or ssh port-forwarding – then asyncio's streams layer is probably not a good choice as it currently stands. (Working directly at the protocol layer would be somewhat better, because the buffer is reduced, but it's still not ideal in this respect – the curio style still gives us more control over the receive window while being simpler to use.) I don't have a fix to show here. This seems to be an intrinsic limitation of the hybrid design strategy – because of the way the async/await-centric StreamReader is built on top of asyncio's callback-centric protocol layer, it's not obvious how or whether asyncio could switch to the just-in-time- recv model. Bug #3: closing time There's a final showstopper bug in the asyncio streams example (only), which is pretty obvious once you see it, but not so obvious how to fix. Here's the core of the proxy function again for reference. After the incoming connection has been closed, copy_all returns and the with closing(dest_writer) block calls dest_writer.close() , and then we stop the event loop: try : with closing ( source_writer ): tmp = await asyncio . open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port , loop = loop ) dest_reader , dest_writer = tmp with closing ( dest_writer ): await copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ) finally : await server_done_event . wait () loop . stop () The problem is that again, it's dest_writer.close() , not await dest_writer.close() – we don't wait for the socket to actually close, we just make a note to close the socket later, once the send buffer has finished emptying out. But then we immediately stop the event loop before that can happen (maybe – it's a race condition), so some data will get dropped on the floor and lost. We need to wait for the close to complete before stopping the loop. But how? Unless I've missed something, the StreamWriter API actually does not provide any mechanism for detecting when the stream has been closed (!). But we might reason that since the close is delayed until all data has been written, we can trick the close into happening promptly by draining the send buffer first: try : with closing ( source_writer ): tmp = await asyncio . open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port , loop = loop ) dest_reader , dest_writer = tmp try : await copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ) finally : await dest_writer . drain () dest_writer . close () finally : await server_done_event . wait () loop . stop () Unfortunately, this isn't enough. As the docs warn us, drain doesn't actually block until all data is written; it only guarantees that the unwritten data is less than the "high water mark", whose default is undocumented but currently appears to be 64 KiB, and specifically tries to make sure that there's at least a "low water mark" worth of unsent data (default 16 KiB). So adding the drain call makes this bug harder to hit, and it might seem to work in testing (especially since you need a slow network connection to really increase the odds, and who runs their tests over a slow network connection?), but sooner or later we're going to randomly lose data. To really fix the problem, we need to get rid of this high-water mark thing. This can be done by calling transport.set_write_buffer_limits(0) on the underlying transport object; then drain will only return once the send buffer is completely empty. Unfortunately, the only supported way to get access to the transport object is to copy-paste the implementation of asyncio.open_connection into our code, and add the call there. (It's lucky we aren't implementing a bi-directional proxy; if we were, then we'd also have to do this to the implementation of asyncio.start_server – in general, all of the stream helper functions are seem to currently be unusable if you need to be able to cleanly shut down a write stream in a protocol where you have the last word.) Is this safe, though? The documentation specifically warns us not to do this: "Use of zero for either limit is generally sub-optimal as it reduces opportunities for doing I/O and computation concurrently." Superficially, this warning seems to make a lot of sense. Our network card can only send data at certain moments, and in a modern operating system with pre-emptive multi-tasking, there's no way to guarantee that our application will be ready to hand off a packet at the exact moment when the network card wants it. So we need some sort of buffer that we load up with data ahead of time, and that the network card can read at its leisure. And if this buffer ever runs completely empty, the network card will go idle, which would be bad and waste bandwidth – so our application needs to wake up to refill the buffer before it goes empty, to give us a bit of a cushion to keep things going while we're getting the new data ready. That's the concurrent computation and I/O that the docs are referring to, and low-water/high-water logic provides this cushion. But... while I'm not an expert on networking (certainly not like these folks!), and this stuff can be hella subtle... I'm pretty sure this reasoning is all completely wrong. Because the thing is... we already have a buffer that does all that stuff: the kernel's socket send buffer. The send syscall doesn't actually write packets to the network – it just enqueues our data into a buffer inside the kernel, where the lower-level networking stack knows to look for them when it wants them. select and friends don't wait for the send buffer to be empty before marking the socket writeable – they implement some low-water/high-water logic. And on modern systems, the kernel will even do fancy stuff like automatically tuning the buffer size depending on the speed of the connection and the amount of memory pressure the system is under. Plus, for various reasons the kernel buffer is usually too big. Adding a second user-space send buffer on top of this seems entirely superfluous. (Especially since the way asynchronous I/O works, whenever our application is blocked on the CPU then it means we aren't running through the event loop and letting it hand off data from the userspace buffer to the kernel. So how would this concurrent I/O and computation even work?) As far as I can tell, the historical reason the asyncio userspace send buffer exists has nothing to do with performance. It's a necessary evil motivated purely by the need to let transport.write be non-blocking, so that callback-based programming becomes less painful. The asyncio low-watermark/high-watermark logic seems to be based on it then being confused for a different kind of buffer. So the docs are wrong: for optimal performance the watermarks should always be set to zero, to reduce bufferbloat and let the kernel buffer do its job. Okay, phew. Having dealt with that, are we finally finished? Not quite. We can now be confident that all our data will be transmitted to the outgoing socket, but it's still possible that the socket itself will remain open at the time our event loop exits. This is a bit of a nit-picky point. In our example, it actually doesn't matter, because as soon as the event loop exits then the program exits as well, and that will close down the socket. But in general this can be important. For example, in your test suite you should probably be running each test with its own isolated event loop, to make sure that different tests can't interfere with each other – but if each event loop you shut down leaves behind some dangling resources, multiply that by the number of tests you run and you might have a problem. Twisted's unit test framework goes to great lengths to annoy people into getting this right. So, let's assume we'd like to actually, finally, for real, close our socket before we stop the event loop. We're calling close . What else do we need? Well, if we grovel around in the asyncio source for long enough, we discover that StreamWriter.close calls transport.close , but transport.close doesn't actually close the socket. Instead, it schedules a call to _call_connection_lost on the next event loop iteration, and that's what actually closes the socket. So if we want to actually close the socket, we have to yield to the event loop between our call to dest_stream.close() and our call to loop.stop() . I believe that yielding once should be enough to make this happen deterministically, since even if on the next iteration we get resumed first and call loop.stop() before the socket has closed, the event loop should still finish calling all currently-scheduled callbacks before it actually stops. I think. So long as those internal details don't change. I also wonder what about what happens if some error is detected during socket shutdown, and how that's supposed to propagate out through this API. Anyway. In conclusion, here's a final version of our simple asyncio streams-based proxy server. This version still has extraneous buffering on the receive side, but it now does transmit back-pressure and (I think) reliably and correctly cleans up after itself. The lines that had to be added/changed are highlighted: Download source: asyncio-proxy-streams-3.py 1 import sys 2 from functools import partial 3 from contextlib import closing 4 import asyncio 5 6 READ_SIZE = 20000 7 8 # Contains code derived (and modified) from the asyncio library, which is 9 # distributed under the Apache 2 license: 10 # https://github.com/python/asyncio/blob/master/COPYING 11 # asyncio is copyright its authors: 12 # https://github.com/python/asyncio/blob/master/AUTHORS 13 @asyncio . coroutine 14 def fixed_open_connection ( host = None , port = None , * , 15 loop = None , limit = 65536 , ** kwds ): 16 if loop is None : 17 loop = asyncio . get_event_loop () 18 reader = asyncio . StreamReader ( limit = limit , loop = loop ) 19 protocol = asyncio . StreamReaderProtocol ( reader , loop = loop ) 20 transport , _ = yield from loop . create_connection ( 21 lambda : protocol , host , port , ** kwds ) 22 ###### Following line added to fix buffering issues: 23 transport . set_write_buffer_limits ( 0 ) 24 ###### 25 writer = asyncio . StreamWriter ( transport , protocol , reader , loop ) 26 return reader , writer 27 28 async def main ( loop , source_port , dest_host , dest_port ): 29 connect_event = asyncio . Event () 30 server_closed_event = asyncio . Event () 31 bound_cb = partial ( proxy , 32 loop , connect_event , server_closed_event , 33 dest_host , dest_port ) 34 server = await asyncio . start_server ( bound_cb , "localhost" , source_port , 35 loop = loop ) 36 await connect_event . wait () 37 server . close () 38 await server . wait_closed () 39 server_closed_event . set () 40 41 async def proxy ( loop , connect_event , server_closed_event , 42 dest_host , dest_port , 43 source_reader , source_writer ): 44 connect_event . set () 45 try : 46 with closing ( source_writer ): 47 tmp = await fixed_open_connection ( dest_host , dest_port , loop = loop ) 48 dest_reader , dest_writer = tmp 49 try : 50 await copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ) 51 finally : 52 await dest_writer . drain () 53 dest_writer . close () 54 # To let the socket actually close 55 await asyncio . sleep ( 0 , loop = loop ) 56 finally : 57 await server_closed_event . wait () 58 loop . stop () 59 60 async def copy_all ( source_reader , dest_writer ): 61 while True : 62 await dest_writer . drain () 63 data = await source_reader . read ( READ_SIZE ) 64 if not data : # EOF 65 return 66 dest_writer . write ( data ) 67 68 if __name__ == "__main__" : 69 try : 70 args = [ int ( sys . argv [ 1 ]), sys . argv [ 2 ], int ( sys . argv [ 3 ])] 71 except Exception : 72 print ( "Usage: {} SOURCE_PORT DEST_HOST DEST_PORT" . format ( __file__ )) 73 else : 74 loop = asyncio . get_event_loop () 75 loop . create_task ( main ( loop , * args )) 76 loop . run_forever ()

Other challenges for hybrid APIs Timeouts and cancellation Timeouts are important, because they're ubiquitous – any code that does I/O and might be run unattended had better make sure that there are timeouts covering every single I/O operation. Yet, in many I/O frameworks, handling timeouts correctly is extremely difficult. For example, if you're doing synchronous I/O using the stdlib socket module, then you get the ability to set a timeout on each individual send and receive operation – but this is far too low-level. Curio instead offers a context manager that imposes a timeout on everything inside it. This means that we can straightforwardly take a function that performs some complex operation with multiple types of I/O, and impose a timeout on it as a whole: # A function that does some complex I/O async def upload_big_file_over_http ( sock ): await sock . sendall ( b "POST /upload HTTP/1.1 \r

" b "Host: example.com \r

" b "Expect: 100-continue \r

" b "Content-Length: 10000000 \r

\r

" ) # Read the server's interim response -- either telling us # to go ahead, or giving a final rejection: response = await read_http_response ( sock ) if response . status == 100 : # 100 Continue await sock . sendall ( b "x" * 10000000 ) response = await read_http_response ( sock ) return response # Imposing a timeout on it from outside async def main (): sock = ... async with curio . timeout_after ( 60 ): # 1 minute await upload_big_file_over_http ( sock ) This approach is really brilliant. In the traditional system, every function had to manually implement complex timeout logic and expose it as part of its API. Here, the code living inside the context manager does need to handle cancellation correctly, but otherwise can be completely oblivious to timeouts. We use exactly the same API to impose a timeout on a primitive send call and on a complex RPC operation. Timeouts can be nested. It's great. Of course this idea isn't unique to curio. You can implement the context manager style API in asyncio too. But – you can probably guess where I'm going to go with this – handling timeouts and cancellations in a hybrid callbacks+async/await system creates a number of unique and unnecessary challenges. First, since we can't assume that everyone is using async/await, our hybrid system needs to have some alternative, redundant system for handling timeouts and cancellations in callback-using code – in asyncio this is the Future cancellation system, and there isn't really a callback-level timeout system so you have to roll your own. In curio, there are no callbacks, so there's no need for a second system. In fact, in curio there's only the one way to express timeouts – timeout= kwargs simply don't exist. So we can focus our energies on making this one system as awesome as possible. Then, once you have two systems, you have to figure out how they interact. This is not trivial. For example, I suspect most people would find the behavior of this asyncio program surprising: Download source: spooky-cancellation-at-a-distance.py import asyncio loop = asyncio . get_event_loop () async def child ( name , fut , event ): print ( " {} started" . format ( name )) try : event . set () await fut except asyncio . CancelledError : print ( " {} cancelled" . format ( name )) async def main (): fut = asyncio . Future () # Start two tasks, and give them a chance to block on the same future. event1 = asyncio . Event () task1 = loop . create_task ( child ( "task 1" , fut , event1 )) await event1 . wait () event2 = asyncio . Event () task2 = loop . create_task ( child ( "task 2" , fut , event2 )) await event2 . wait () # Cancel task1... task1 . cancel () # ...then block on task2. await task2 loop . run_until_complete ( main ()) (It prints: task 1 started / task 2 started / task 1 cancelled / task 2 cancelled. Note that task 2 was not cancelled. Note also that if we comment out the calls to event.wait() , then the program hangs instead (which is probably the outcome we expected in the first place – but we might not have expected those lines to affect the result). Note also also that if we move the cancellation to just after the call to event1.wait() , before spawning task2 , then the program does not hang – so we can't avoid this by checking for multiple waiters when propagating cancellations from tasks->futures.) The fundamental problem here is that Future s often have a unique consumer but might have arbitrarily many, and that Future s are stuck half-way between being an abstraction representing communication and being an abstraction representing computation. The end result is that when a task is blocked on a Future , Task.cancel simply has no way to know whether that future should be considered to be "part of" the task. So it has to guess, and inevitably its guess will sometimes be wrong. (An interesting case where this could arise in real code would be two asyncio.Task s that both call await writer.drain() on the same StreamWriter ; under the covers, they end up blocked on the same Future .) In curio, there are no Future s or callback chains, so this ambiguity never arises in the first place. Next, there's the problem of actually implementing cancellation. For callback-based operations, this is certainly possible. It's just really difficult to do, and every cancellable operation has to carefully implement it from scratch. And in practice, basic primitives like transport.write don't support cancellation, which makes it very difficult to write cancellation-safe code on top of them. For example, here's the asyncio version of our HTTP upload example: # asyncio version # Pretend that StreamWriter has been fixed to attempt to expose a # causal API -- this example shows that that still isn't enough :-( async def almost_causal_write ( writer , data ): writer . write ( data ) await writer . drain () async def upload_big_file_over_http ( reader , writer ): await almost_causal_write ( writer , b "POST /upload HTTP/1.1 \r

" b "Host: example.com \r

" b "Expect: 100-continue \r

" b "Content-Length: 10000000 \r

\r

" ) # Read the server's interim response telling us whether # to go ahead: response = await read_http_response ( reader ) if response . status == 100 : # 100 Continue await almost_causal_write ( writer , b "x" * 10000000 ) response = await read_http_response ( sock ) return response # Imposing a timeout on it from outside async def main (): reader , writer = ... from async_timeout import timeout with timeout ( 60 ): # 1 minute await upload_big_file_over_http ( reader , writer ) There's an excellent chance that the timeout will fire after we've started the 10 MB upload, and are blocked in the drain call inside almost_causal_write . If this happens, then upload_big_file_over_http will return early but the upload will continue, because it's happening in a logically concurrent thread! And note that this is really a another special case of a non-causality. Our causal_write function does manage to be causal so long as it completes normally. But if it gets cancelled, then from the perspective of the caller it has returned (by raising an exception) – yet the underlying operation is still going, which is the definition of non-causal behavior. There are ways to work around this, but in general, any function that calls any cancellation-unsafe functions is also going to be cancellation-unsafe by default, and it's hard to write much code in asyncio without calling unsafe functions like transport.write . I'm not even sure what a cancellation-safe version of transport.write would look like :-(. In curio, supporting cancellation isn't free, but it's much much easier: all primitive operations are cancellation-safe, so we start from a solid foundation, and then beyond that it basically comes down to writing code that properly cleans up in the face of exceptions. And this kind of exception-safety is a local property we can check on a function-by-function basis, is something we have to worry about anyway, and is often easy to handle because we can let Python's tools like context managers to do the heavy lifting. Event loop lifecycle management Remember how up above in our initial discussion of the different example programs, even before we got into the bugs in the asyncio versions, we noted that the curio version was simpler because it was able to take advantage of curio's system for shutting down the event loop when all non-daemonic tasks were complete? This system is possible because curio restricts itself to managing only full-fledged async function callstacks, not arbitrary callback chains. This means that curio has a complete high-level representation of what tasks are running, and a standard place to store metadata like which ones should be considered daemonic. And this isn't just a convenience: it also means that curio can guarantee that every task's cleanup code (e.g. finally blocks) are executed before shutting down. Asyncio doesn't really have any way to do the equivalent, even in principle. It can't tell whether a loop.add_reader callback is "daemonic", i.e., whether it's associated with providing some background service like logging or whether it's some specific ongoing callback chain that's on the application's critical path; if it is a background service it has no way to tell whether it needs to be cleaned up somehow when the loop shuts down; and even if it does need some kind of cleanup, there's no way for the loop to "cancel" that callback chain and tell it to run its cleanup. Because callback-based execution threads are implicit, not reified, the user is left to keep track of these kinds of things manually. And any code that uses asyncio's protocol/transport layer is implicitly creating these kinds of anonymous callback chains. Obviously it's possible despite all this to write asyncio programs that correctly handle the event loop lifetime; the point is that because of asyncio's choice to use a hybrid design, it can't provide much help in solving these issues, so you're stuck doing it manually each time instead. Getting in touch with your event loop It's often useful to have multiple event loops in the same process. For example, we might want to spawn several OS-level threads and run an event loop in each, or we might want to give each of our tests its own event loop, so that we don't have stray callbacks left behind by test A firing while we're running test B. And this means that any code that does I/O has to have some mechanism to figure out which event loop it should be using. In principle, if you're using async/await, this should be trivial: async functions by definition have to be supervised by some sort of coroutine runner, and await provides dedicated syntax for talking to this supervisor. In curio, the supervisor is the event loop itself; in asyncio, technically the supervisor isn't the event loop itself but rather an `asyncio.Task object, but asyncio.Task objects hold a reference to the correct event loop. So if you're using async/await, this ambient event loop reference is always present and accessible in principle, and the language runtime makes sure that it's passed implicitly to callees without any effort on your part. But asyncio assumes that you might not be using async/await, so almost none of its APIs take advantage of this. Instead, it gives you two options. Option 1 is that you can manually pass along a reference to the correct event loop every time you call a function that might (recursively) do I/O. This is unpopular because it takes work and clutters up your code. (You can see a bit of this in the proxy examples above.) Plus it's frustrating since, as we said above, if you're a sensible person who uses async/await then this is forcing you to do redundant work that the runtime is already doing for you. Option 2 is to be lazy, and to grab the global event loop whenever you need it (which asyncio makes very easy to do – all asyncio API functions will default to using the global event loop unless you explicitly tell them otherwise). Of course the problem with this is that as we saw above, you can't assume that there is just one global event loop, which is why instead of having a single global event loop, the asyncio API instead allows you to specify a global object implementing the AbstractEventLoopPolicy interface which encapsulates a strategy for introspecting the current context to determine which global event loop should be returned from each call to get_event_loop . So, you know, implement that and you're good to go. Just make sure the three different mechanisms for getting the event loop always give identical results and it'll work fine, because configuring redundant systems is always fun and certainly not error prone. I tease, of course. In practice this mostly works out well enough, and none of this is actually going to stop anyone from writing working programs with asyncio – this is probably the most minor issue discussed in this essay. But it's a source of ongoing friction, and causes real problems. OTOH, because curio is async/await all the way down, this friction just... goes away. Or rather, is never there in the first place. There are no global variables, no policy objects with LotsOfCapitalLetters, and nothing to pass around. If you need to issue some I/O, you call await whatever() and the Python interpreter automatically directs your request to the right event loop. (Sorta like how return values magically go to the right place.) Of course your test suite creates a fresh new event loop for each independent test and different tests never pollute each other's event loop by accident, that's just the easiest way to do it. Normally we don't even explicitly instantiate the event loop object; it's an internal implementation detail of curio.run . I don't see any way to fix this in asyncio, because it's – again – a sort of inevitable penalty for wanting to mix async/await and callback APIs in the same library. A small improvement would be to add a function like await asyncio.get_ambient_event_loop() , so that leaf async functions could at least summon the correct event loop reference on demand whenever they were about to transition to the callback API, without it having to be manually passed down the call stack. But this still requires an error-prone manual step at that transition point, and that seems unavoidable as long as we have a callback-friendly API at all. I guess for the asyncio entry points that already are async functions (e.g. asyncio.open_connection ) we could change the default so that loop=None does a call to await asyncio.get_ambient_event_loop() rather than asyncio.get_event_loop() . But then, it could get pretty confusing if some API calls default to the right event loop, while others you have to make sure to pass it in explicitly because the defaults are different. [Edit: I may have been overly pessimistic! I'm told that asyncio's global event loop fetching API is going to be reworked in 3.6 and backported to 3.5.3. If I understand correctly (which is not 100% certain, and I don't think the actual code has been written yet [edit**2: here it is]), the new system will be: asyncio.get_event_loop() , instead of directly calling the currently-registered AbstractEventLoopPolicy 's get_event_loop() method, will first check some thread-local global to see if a Task is currently executing, and if so it will immediately return the event loop associated with that Task (and otherwise it will continue to fall back on the AbstractEventLoopPolicy . This means that inside async functions it should now be guaranteed (via somewhat indirect means) that asyncio.get_event_loop() gives you the same event loop that you'd get by doing an await . And, more importantly, since asyncio.get_event_loop() is what the callback-level APIs use to pick a default event loop when one isn't specified, this also means that async/await code should be able to safely use callback-layer functions without explicitly specifying an event loop, which is a neat improvement over my suggestion above. I think it's still illustrative of my general point here that asyncio required three Python releases in order to settle on a system that uses multiple layers of complex logic just to get back to the place where curio started. But as long as end-users aren't peeking under the covers then they shouldn't notice much difference anymore, at least in this regard.] Context passing / task-local storage Suppose we have a server handling various requests, where each request triggers a complex set of events – RPCs, database calls, whatever. When monitoring and debugging such a server, it's very useful if we can arrange for each incoming request to be assigned a unique id, and then make sure that all the logs generated deep inside (for example) the database library are tagged with this unique id, so that we can later aggregate the logs to get a complete picture of an individual misbehaving request. But how does the logging code inside the database library find this id? Ideally we could pass it down as part of an explicit "context" object, but this isn't always practical, especially given that the Python stdlib logging module doesn't provide any way to do this. What we need is some sort of async equivalent to "thread-local storage", where we can stash data and make it accessible to a complete logical execution flow. In callback-based frameworks, this kind of context propagation requires modifying every callback-scheduling operation to capture the context when the callback is scheduled, store it, and then restore it before the callback is executed. This is challenging, because there are lots of callback-scheduling operations that need to implement this logic, and some of them are in third-party libraries. In a curio-style framework, the problem is almost trivial, because all code runs in the context of a Task , so we can store our task-local data there and immediately cover all uses cases. And if we want to propagate context to sub-tasks, then as described above, sub-task spawning goes through a single bottleneck inside the curio library, so this is also easy. I actually started writing a simple example here of how to implement this on curio to show how easy it was... but then I decided that probably it made more sense as a pull request, so now I don't have to argue that curio could easily support task-local storage, because it actually does! It took ~15 lines of code for the core functionality, and the rest is tests, comments, and glue to present a convenient threading.Local -style API on top; there's a concrete example to give a sense of what it looks like in action. I also recommend this interesting review of async context propagation mechanisms written by two developers at Google. A somewhat irreverant but (I think) fair summary would be (a) Dart baked a solution into the language, so that works great, (b) in Go, Google just forces everyone to pass around explicit context objects everywhere as part of their style guide, and they have enough leverage that everyone mostly goes along with it, (c) in C# they have the same system I implemented in curio (as I learned after implementing it!) and it works great because no-one uses callbacks, but (d) context propagation in Javascript is an ongoing disaster because Javascript uses callbacks, and no-one can get all the third-party libraries to agree on a single context-passing solution... partly because even the core packages like node.js can't decide on one. Note Incidentally, looking at Javascript makes me grateful again for the care and deliberateness of Python's maintainers. It's possible that asyncio and its hybrid approach might turn out to be a dead-end, but – if so, then, oh well, at the end of the day it's just a library. We can recover. Javascript OTOH is getting async/await any day now, but the language is all-in on callbacks, so Javascript's async/await will always be the hybrid kind, and AFAICT many of this essay's critiques apply. A libuv-backed curio running on PyPy 3 might someday make an extraordinarily compelling competitor to node.js. So this is another domain where asyncio's hybrid nature creates a challenge: of course it would be easy enough to implement a task-local storage system that works only for asyncio Task objects, but then we'd still have the question of what to do for callback-based code, and how to handle the hand-off point between them. Probably there is some solution, but finding it seems like it would take a lot of work, and the benefit isn't clear given all the other issues that callbacks create. Implementation complexity Finally, I want to say a few words about internal implementation complexity. Just like you can implement anything with goto instead of structured programming, with enough work, it's almost certainly possible for asyncio to eventually fix these bugs, implement reliable cancellation for all of its callback-based primitives, and so forth, and eventually expose a curio-style API on top of some sort of callback-based infrastructure. And from the user's point of view, this would be fine – it doesn't necessarily matter to them what's happening under the hood, so long as the public semantics are right, and users could just ignore all that callback-based stuff. But... asyncio's internals are really hard to follow. This isn't a criticism of the authors. I've highlighted a number of problems here, but what you can't see is all the times that I was convinced that I'd found another nasty edge case bug, only to eventually realize that someone else had already noticed the problem and carefully arranged to handle it. Asyncio is very thoughtfully written callback soup; the problem is that callback soup is just too complicated for human minds – at least, my human mind – to understand. The end result is that I'd estimate it took me ~3x longer to understand the actual semantics of asyncio.StreamWriter 's and asyncio.StreamReader 's public APIs than it did to read all of curio's source code, implement task-local storage, and diagnose a concurrency bug in curio.Event . (By the way, I recommend reading through curio as an exercise; it's not perfect – as that Event bug indicates :-) – but overall it's remarkably small and straightforward.) And if that's what it takes me just to understand asyncio, then I wince to think how much energy was spent on implementing it and fixing all those edge cases in the first place. If you're an event-loop developer, or the author of a protocol library, then is this really how you want to be spending your time? On implementing complicated callback-based APIs, and then on implementing another complicated layer on top of that to cancel out all the problems introduced by the callback-based APIs, and then spending a lot of time trying to squash all the weird edge case bugs introduced by the impedence mismatch between the layers? It's all so unnecessary! It's 2016, and you don't have to live like that anymore! AFAICT going async/await-native is a direct path to fewer bugs and more happiness.

Review and summing up: what is "async/await-native" anyway? In previous asynchronous APIs for Python, the use of callback-oriented programming led to the invention of a whole set of conventions that effectively make up an entire ad hoc programming language, in the sense that they provide their own methods for expressing basic computational constructs like sequencing, error handling, resource cleanup, and so forth. The result is somewhat analogous to the bad old days before structured programming, where basic constructs like function calls and loops had to be constructed on the fly out of primitive tools like goto . In theory, one can do anything. In practice, it's extraordinarily difficult to write correct code in this style, especially when one starts to think about edge conditions. Now that Python has async/await, it's possible to start using Python's native mechanisms to solve these problems. Python's tools are, unsurprisingly, a huge improvement over the old system; but, when used in a hybrid system layered on top of the older callback approach, many of these advantages are blunted or lost. We've seen above that going to a fully async/await-native approach let us easily solve a number of problems that arise in the hybrid approach, like handling backpressure, avoiding bufferbloat and race conditions, handling timeouts and cancellation, figuring out when our program was finished running, and context passing, while reducing our need for global state – and the code is simpler too, both for the library implementors and the library users! These advantages come from consistently following a set of structuring principles. What are these principles? What makes a Python app "async/await-native"? Here's a first attempt at codifying them: An async/await-native application consists of a set of cooperative threads (a.k.a. Task s), each of which consists of some metadata plus an async callstack. Furthermore, this set is complete: all code must run on one of these threads. These threads are supervised: it's guaranteed that every callstack will run to completion – either organically, or after the injection of a cancellation exception. Thread spawning is always explicit, not implicit. Each frame in our callstacks is a regular sync- or async-colored Python function, executing regular imperative code from top to bottom. This requires that both API primitives and higher-level functions *respect causality* whenever possible. Errors, including cancellation and timeouts, are signaled via exceptions, which propagate through Python's regular callstack unwinding. Resource cleanup and error-handling is managed via exception handlers ( with or try ). These work together so that if each piece of our program follows the rules, we end up with strong global guarantees. For example, if an error occurs: (5) tells us that this raises an exception, (1) tells us that this exception will be on one of our thread's callstacks, (4) implies that the exception interrupts execution at a well-defined point in time (for example, we know that code that comes before the exception-raising point is no longer running once we start unwinding), and (6) implies that resources will be cleaned up appropriately as the exception unwinds. Or for any given resource, that analysis + rule (2) gives us confidence that the resource will eventually be cleaned up at an appropriate time. Rules (4) + (5) + (6) together justify the use of a with -style composable timeout API. These might seem almost too trivial to write down, and indeed, if you delete the word "async" then these regular synchronous Python code generally follows all of these rules without anyone bothering to mention them. Yet writing them down seems useful – until curio, every asynchronous I/O library for Python violated all of them!

Open questions ...for async/await-native APIs One of the nice things about this analysis is that it helps suggest ways in which curio or other libraries like it could be improved. In particular, it suggests we should focus on the two places where the above rules currently break down. In particular, AFAICT these are the unique two places where errors can pass silently. Orphan tasks Curio obviously supports spawning new Task s, but once spawned it can be rather tricky to manage them properly. In particular, the event loop's supervision guarantees that they will eventually clean up and exit. But unless you're very careful it's easy to get into situations where a task has crashed and no-one notices, or where a parent task has been cancelled but the child task continues on oblivious. For example, a common pattern I've run into is where I want to spawn several worker tasks that act like "part of" the parent task: if any of them raises an exception then all of them should be cancelled + the parent raise an exception; if the parent is cancelled then they should be cancelled too. We need ergonomic tools for handling these kinds of patterns robustly. Fortunately, this is something that's easy to experiment with, and there's lots of inspiration we can draw from existing systems: Erlang certainly has some good ideas here. Or, curio makes much of the analogy between its event loop and an OS kernel; maybe there should be a way to let certain tasks sign up to act as PID 1 and catch failures in orphan tasks? I think we'll see rapid progress here. Cleanup in generators and async generators Generators and async generators present a somewhat stickier problem. If you think about it, a generator is something very like an independent thread of execution that runs arbitrary code. Given our analysis above, this should make us nervous! Fortunately, stepping through a generator with __iter__ and __next__ turns out to be compatible with our rules, because while the generator acts somewhat like an independent thread semantically, each step gets executed as regular function call that's sort of grafted onto a regular callstack – so the context is correct, exceptions will propagate, etc. The problem is that there's another piece to the generator API, that not everyone realizes is even there. It's the __del__ method. If we have a generator with some sort of cleanup code, like: def some_generator ( path ): try : handle = open ( path ) yield ... finally : handle . close () Note While this essay focuses on async code, everything in this section actually applies equally to the use of regular generators in regular Python code. All the "async/await-native" principles we formulated above like "functions should respect causality" and "no implicit spawning of logical threads of execution" apply just as much to non-async code – it's just that in the non-async case they're so obvious that no-one needed to write them down. async/await forces us to go back and re-examine the foundations of how Python is put together, and take these implicit principles and make them explicit. An interesting side-effect of this is that once we've written them down, suddenly this hidden gap in Python's existing design jumps out at us! and we iterate it, but stop before reaching the end: for obj in some_generator ( path ): break # or for obj in some_generator ( path ): raise ... then eventually that finally block will be executed by the generator's __del__ method (see PEP 342 for details). And if we think about how __del__ works, we realize: it's another sneaky, non-causal implicit-threading API! __del__ does not get executed in the context of the callstack that's using the generator – it happens at some arbitrary time and place. In the special case where you're using CPython, and there are no reference loops involving your generator object, then CPython's use of reference counting does at least guarantee that __del__ will be called at the right time. I.e., as soon as the last reference is dropped then CPython will immediately pause the thread that dropped that reference and execute __del__ right there. However, this still takes places in a special context where exceptions are discarded. Besides which, in most general purpose code you probably shouldn't assume that you're on CPython and that there are no reference loops, in which case all bets are off: generator __del__ methods can easily end up executing arbitrary code without respecting causality, exception propagation, access to the correct task-local storage, timeout restrictions, ... basically all of our rules and the guarantees they're trying to provide just go out the window. Note What about __del__ methods on other objects, besides generators? In theory they have the same problems, but (a) for most objects, like int s or whatever, we don't care when the object is collected, and (b) objects that do have non-trivial cleanup associated with them are mostly obvious "resources" like files or sockets or thread-pools, so it's easy to remember to stick them in a with block. Plus, when we write a class with a __del_ method we're usually very aware of what we're doing. Generators are special because they're just as easy to write as regular functions, and in some programming styles just as common. It's very very easy to throw a with or try inside some generator code and suddenly you've defined a __del__ method without even realizing it, and it feels like a function call, not the creation of a new resource type that needs managing. That's for regular, synchronous generators. Async generators are slightly different, because the reference counting GC part doesn't apply. Even if we're in the happy case on CPython where __del__ gets called synchronously on our callstack, then it still can't actually run async cleanup code directly, because __del__ is sync-colored. (This is a consequence of the weird environment where __del__ methods run, similar to the reason they have to discard exceptions.) PEP 525 provides an API for async generator __del__ methods to hand off to an event loop to spawn a full-fledged Task to run the actual cleanup. Compared to synchronous generators this is kind of an improvement, since regular __del__ methods can run at any moment, like pre-emptively scheduled threads – which Glyph told us is bad – while this async generator cleanup code at least gets scheduled on a cooperative thread and thus respects the use of yield points as a synchronization mechanism. But on the other hand, an implicitly spawned thread is still an implicitly spawned thread, and the fact that this is the only way to run async generator __del__ methods means that we lose even CPython's weak guarantees about when they'll run: so they will never respect causality, exception propagation, access to the correct task-local storage, timeout restrictions, etc. This one worries me, because it's basically the one remaining hole in the lovely interlocking set of rules described above – and here it's the Python language itself that's fighting us. For now, the only solution seems to be to make sure that you never, ever call a generator without explicitly pinning its lifetime with a with block. For synchronous generators, this looks like: def some_sync_generator ( path ): with open ( path ) as ... : yield ... # DON'T do this for obj in some_sync_generator ( path ): ... # DO do this from contextlib import closing with closing ( some_sync_generator ( path )) as tmp : for obj in tmp : ... And for async generators, this looks like: async def some_async_generator ( hostname , port ): async with open_connection ( hostname , port ) as ... : yield ... # DON'T do this async for obj in some_async_generator ( hostname , port ): ... # DO do this class aclosing : def __init__ ( self , agen ): self . _agen = agen def __aenter__ ( self ): return self . _agen def __aclose__ ( self , * args ): await self . _agen . aclose () async with aclosing ( some_async_generator ( hostname , port )) as tmp : async for obj in tmp : ... It might be possible for curio to subvert the PEP 525 __del__ hooks to at least catch cases where async generators are accidentally used without with blocks and signal some kind of error. PEP 533 is one possible proposal for fixing this at the language level, by adding an explicit __iterclose__ method to the iterator protocol and adapting Python's iteration constructs like for accordingly. ...for the Python asynchronous I/O ecosystem What does all this mean for the broader ecosystem? I don't have the answers, but I can try to make the questions more specific! Do you really think everyone's going to abandon callbacks? I hope so! Apparently the C# world has done this and they seem to be doing OK. Arguably it's how golang works too, if you squint. My guess is that Python will get there eventually. But... it certainly won't happen immediately. There's a lot of code out there using callbacks, and for all its flaws, it's a very well-understood paradigm that has been used for lots of large, successful systems. There are also, I think, some very compelling arguments for getting rid of them – hence this essay – but the async/await-native paradigm is still fairly immature and will take some time to settle down and prove itself. My suspicion is that anything you can do with callbacks can be done better without them, but I can't prove it until someone tries. This is another place where the goto /structured programming analogy is surprisingly apt. By 1968, the structured programming folks could show that all programs could be written without goto – but the construction was pretty ugly, and it left open the question of whether programs could be written elegantly without goto . And the answer was not obvious, especially considering that structured programming advocates of the time also liked to forbid the use of break , continue , and mid-function return on the grounds that they were too goto -like. (Exceptions were right out.) Similarly, one could implement an asyncio event loop on top of curio to prove that the curio paradigm is at least as powerful in principle – but this wouldn't really answer the question, and it's entirely possible that current implementations like curio are missing some harmless quality-of-life measures like break . It's pretty exciting: we're on the cusp of learning things! But there are a lot of open questions about what exactly this future looks like. So should I drop asyncio/twisted/etc. and rewrite everything using curio tomorrow? Well... that's a complicated question. If you want to start using the async/await-native approach today, then curio is currently the only game in town. But even if you agree that this is where we want to end up eventually, there are still very good reasons why you might decide not to switch yet. Twisted and tornado are extremely mature, asyncio is in the standard library, and curio is neither of those things. All have seen years of intensive development by lots of very smart people and are in production use at companies you've heard of; curio is currently experimental alpha-status software by basically one guy. There's a much larger ecosystem of supporting libraries around twisted/tornado/asyncio than curio. And while the callback-based paradigm has its faults, those faults and their magnitude is well-understood with known workarounds, while the "curio paradigm" is still under heavy development, and curio-the-software doesn't yet make any promises about API stability. On the other hand, if you find the async/await-native programming model compelling, and want to help flesh out a new paradigm, aren't reliant on the existing ecosystems (or are excited to help build a new one), and are comfortable with the risks, then you should totally go for it. Help us stride forward into a glorious Future -free future! Even if curio doesn't end up being the async/await-native API to end all APIs, we'll still learn something from the attempt. For me personally, it helps that (a) the programs I'm working with are on the smaller side; there are no 20-person teams and big budgets depending on my technology choices; I could always port to something else if I had to. And (b) based on my experience so far in submitting patches to curio versus just trying to understand asyncio's edge case semantics, I'm honestly uncertain whether – if worst came to worst – it would be more work to maintain a personal fork of curio or to use upstream asyncio. Asyncio isn't bad; async/await is just so good that it radically changes the usual maturity calculus. Should asyncio be "fixed" to have a curio-style async/await-native API? In many ways this would be the ideal solution, since it would let us keep a single standard-bearer library with its interoperability story and more-developed ecosystem. And there are APIs in asyncio, like loop.sock_sendall , that seem like they could be first steps in this direction. But there are also some significant challenges: I can't see how this could be done without substantially throwing out and rewriting most of asyncio. Currently, transports are asyncio's fundamental abstraction layer: this is the layer that abstracts across different kinds of communication channels (e.g. sockets versus processes) and it also does a lot of the heavy lifting in abstracting across different underlying APIs (e.g. Unix-style polling versus Windows IOCP). The transport layer is also, as we saw above, the layer whose callback-centric abstractions cause so many problems for async/await code. And below the transport layer we have the event loop itself, where the mismatch isn't quite as great, but it still isn't the most natural fit. I'm not an asyncio developer, so I could be missing something... but the callback chaining parts are pretty deeply baked into asyncio as it currently exists.

As mentioned above, the whole concept of a "curio-style API" is still undergoing heavy development, while asyncio's position in the stdlib makes it a poor place to experiment with new paradigms. This seems like the kind of thing where the ecosystem may be better off letting it stew in a 3rd-party lib for a while.

Presumably the point of giving asyncio a curio-style API is that it would make it easier to mix together curio-style code and callback-style code in the same program (since I assume asyncio's current APIs wouldn't be going away – this would be supplemental). But – my whole argument in this essay is that for the most part, you don't want to mix these. So it's not clear what the point would be, really. If we're going to end up with two separate-but-equal APIs that only communicate at arms-length, then sticking them into two separate namespaces seems like it would be a lot less confusing. So maybe this wouldn't be the best idea? I'll be very interested to see what the asyncio developers think. One possible future would be: asyncio remains as the standard-bearer for the callback/hybrid approach – which is obviously going to remain viable and in use indefinitely – while eventually fading into becoming a legacy library as async/await-native approach matures and takes over for new code. (This is a not-unfamiliar trajectory for stdlib libraries – see urllib2.) Okay, then should curio switch to using asyncio as a backend? Or what will the story be on cross-event-loop compatibility? I thought asyncio was supposed to be the event loop to end all event loops! Indeed, one of the original, compelling motivations for adding asyncio to the stdlib is that it could become a standard foundation layer, so we could start up one event loop in one thread and then use it to simultaneously run libraries written for twisted, tornado, ... well, mostly twisted and tornado. And as a secondary benefit, we could swap in different backends to work on Unix vs. Windows, or on a headless server vs. embedded in a GUI app where the GUI framework imposes a particular event loop. Plus it's nice if different libraries can share code, so not everyone has to implement, say, IOCP handling from scratch. Of course, this vision is rather predicated on the fact that until async/await came along, all these different event loops basically worked the same way, and the idea that there are lots of existing libraries that we want to use together. It's not clear that curio could run nicely on top of asyncio – in particular, it seems difficult to reconcile their different ideas of how to manage the lifecycle of the event loop itself, and as we've seen, asyncio's higher-level abstractions are not useful to curio. They do already share code in the form of the selectors module (which is a great addition that asyncio brought to the stdlib!). Unfortunately, selectors isn't high-level enough to abstract over the differences between Unix and Windows, and as a result curio doesn't currently have great Windows support... but unfortunately there currently is no such abstraction layer that could be shared between curio and asyncio, because as mentioned above, asyncio's IOCP abstractions rely on the transport interfaces, and those are not useful to curio. It would be great if there were a library that abstracted over these platform differences at a lower level than asyncio does – maybe libuv could serve as an inspiration. In addition, the main theme of this essay is that libraries written using async/await natively will be simpler and higher-quality than libraries written using callbacks, with or without an async/await layer added on top. So ideally we want to throw out those old libraries using the old APIs and replace them! This might be particularly true given the current interest in migrating to Sans I/O-style protocol libraries – which, in addition to their advantages in terms of design and maintainability, also make it much easier to migrate between incompatible I/O APIs, which makes direct interoperability less urgent. ...but of course, while the "throw out all the legacy code" strategy might work okay for green-field projects using popular protocols like HTTP, it doesn't help with that legacy tornado app, and it's probably going to be a while until we see an async/await-native client for NNTP or IMAP4. So it would be nice to have some kind of interopability story. One approach would be: start two OS threads. In one thread, run your async/await-native event loop; in the other thread, run your twisted reactor. Communicate by message passing. This approach is really crude... but, the programming models are different enough that message-passing might be what you want to use anyway. (I mean, curio doesn't even have a Deferred / Future concept, and for good reasons.) So even this crude approach might give you 90% of what you'd get by merging the underlying event loops, and with much less fuss? This suggests that a library for cross-event-loop message passing might be an interesting short-term target for those who are worried about interoperability. As for plugging in different backends, like for GUI framework interoperability: I'm not sure how that might work, and am not enough of a GUI programmer to have any useful insight into how async/await affect GUI programming. Definitely an interesting open question.