Nathaniel J. Smith - Trio: Async concurrency for mere mortals - PyCon 2018

Speaker: Nathaniel J. Smith

Concurrent programs are super useful: think of web apps juggling lots of simultaneous downloads and websocket connections, chat bots tracking multiple concurrent conversations, or web spiders fetching pages in parallel. But writing concurrent programs is complicated, intimidating to newcomers, and often challenging even for experts.

Does it have to be? Python is famous for being simple and straightforward; can Python make concurrent programming simple and straightforward too? I think so. By carefully analyzing usability pitfalls in other libraries, and taking advantage of new Python 3 features, I've come up with a new set of primitives that make it dramatically easier to write correct concurrent programs, and implemented them in a new library called [Trio](https://trio.readthedocs.io). In this talk, I'll describe these primitives, and demonstrate how to use them to implement a basic algorithm for speeding up TCP connections. Compared to the best previous Python implementation, our version turns out to be easier to understand, more correct, and dramatically shorter.

This talk assumes basic familiarity with Python, but does not require any prior experience with concurrency, async/await, or networking.


Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2018 and https://github.com/PyCon/2018-slides