Asyncio was introduced to the Python programming language in version 3.4 and added some excellent functionality and it has been an overall hit with the Python community.
Asyncio is a module that allows us to easily write single-threaded, concurrent programs utilizing coroutines, which we'll cover later on in this chapter. It also does a lot of other clever stuff such as multiplexing I/O access over sockets as well as other resources, and provides us with an array of synchronization primitives that allow us to write thread-safe programs with relative ease.
Within the module, we have a number of distinct concepts as follows:
- The event loop
- Futures
- Coroutines
- Tasks
- Transports
- Protocols
Each of these concepts serve their own distinct purpose that can be intertwined to create readable, highly-performant Python programs. We'll look at each of these concepts in more depth throughout the rest of this chapter.
The asyncio module features a wealth of different tools and classes for writing programs...