All my functions are red

April 13, 2024

If you haven’t read Bob Nystroms frustrated article about asynchronous programming already, go do it. It’s here and it’s fantastic.

Now, it seems like all my bits are red.

Today, this has happened many times.

/some/long/path/to/file.py:22: RuntimeWarning: coroutine 'foobar' was never awaited
  foobar()
RuntimeWarning: Enable tracemalloc to get the object allocation traceback

This is by itself quite good, the interpreter told me about a problem. Thanks mister computer interpreter sir, I appreciate it!

The problem is that when I add await to this call, I just get the same error message for the level above in the stack. And on an on it goes until every function in that call stack is painted red like tipping a full can of paint down the stairs.

Frustrating indeed!!

This makes it harder to test, hard to grasp and harder to modify. What’s the bloody point!?

…

Now, admittedly I’m quite new to the whole asyncio in Python system and I have to wrap my head around it. It does not come natural for me though. I think the system is quite complicated, much more complicated than threads. To be perfectly honest though, I don’t think the high-level idea of an event loop is complicated, but the way it’s stuffed into the way that you code is just so impractical.

I should probably go study this thing, to help my future self with the inevitable high blood pressure.