Stupid Python Ideas: June 2015

Why isn't asyncio too slow?

When asyncio was first proposed, many people (not so much on python-ideas, where Guido first suggested it, but on external blogs) had the same reaction: Doing the core reactor loop in Python is going to be way too slow. Something based on libev, like gevent, is inherently going to be much faster.

Then, when Python 3.4 came out, people started benchmarking it. For example, this benchmark shows that handling 100000 redis connections, 50 at a time, sending 3-byte messages, takes 3.12 seconds in asyncio vs. 4.55 in gevent.

And yet, I still see people refusing to believe those benchmarks, or their own benchmarks that they run to prove them wrong.

Jun

Hacking Python without hacking Python

Let's say you have a good idea for a change to Python. How do you implement it?

Well, first you go to the devguide, and then you see that if you want to change the grammar there's a long checklist of things you usually need to change, and then you look at the source, and some of those things aren't even really documented, you just have to pick it up from the surrounding code.

But in many cases, that isn't necessary during the exploratory phase.