# Asynchronous Programming

## Introduction

There are many ways to write network programs. The main ones are:

1. Handle each connection in a separate process
2. Handle each connection in a separate thread<super>1</super>
3. Use non-blocking system calls to handle all connections in one thread.

When dealing with many connections in one thread, the scheduling is the responsibility of the application, not the operating system, and is usually implemented by calling a registered function when each connection is ready to for reading or writing -- commonly known as asynchronous, event-driven or callback-based programming.

Multi-threaded programming is tricky, even with high level abstractions, and Python's Global Interpreter Lock limits the potential performance gain. Forking Python processes also has many disadvantages, such as Python's reference counting not playing well with copy-on-write and problems with shared state. Consequently, it was felt the best option was an event-driven framework. A benefit of such an approach is that by letting other event-driven frameworks take over the main loop, server and client code are essentially the same -- making peer-to-peer a reality.

However, event-driven programming still contains some tricky aspects. As each callback must be finished as soon as possible, it is not possible to keep persistent state in function-local variables. In addition, some programming techniques, such as recursion, are impossible to use -- for example, this rules out protocol handlers being recursive-descent parsers. Event-driven programming has a reputation of being hard to use due to the frequent need to write state machines. Twisted was built with the assumption that with the right library, event-driven programming is easier than multi-threaded programming.

Note that Twisted still allows the use of threads if you really need them, usually to interface with synchronous legacy code. See Using Threads for details.

## Async Design Issues

In Python, code is often divided into a generic class calling overridable methods which subclasses implement. In that, and similar, cases, it is important to think about likely implementations. If it is conceivable that an implementation might perform an action which takes a long time (either because of network or CPU issues), then one should design that method to be asynchronous. In general, this means to transform the method to be callback based. In Twisted, it usually means returning a Deferred.

Since non-volatile state cannot be kept in local variables, because each method must return quickly, it is usually kept in instance variables. In cases where recursion would have been tempting, it is usually necessary to keep stacks manually, using Python's list and the `.append` and `.pop` method. Because those state machines frequently get non-trivial, it is better to layer them such that each one state machine does one thing -- converting events from one level of abstraction to the next higher level of abstraction. This allows the code to be clearer, as well as easier to debug.

## Using Reflection

One consequence of using the callback style of programming is the need to name small chunks of code. While this may seem like a trivial issue, used correctly it can prove to be an advantage. If strictly consistent naming is used, then much of the common code in parsers of the form of if/else rules or long cases can be avoided. For example, the SMTP client code has an instance variable which signifies what it is trying to do. When receiving a response from the server, it just calls the method `"do_%s_%s" % (self.state, responseCode)`. This eliminates the requirement for registering the callback or adding to large if/else chains. In addition, subclasses can easily override or change the actions when receiving some responses, with no additional harness code. The SMTP client implementation can be found in `twisted/protocols/smtp.py`.

## Footnotes

1. There are variations on this method, such as a limited-size pool of threads servicing all connections, which are essentially just optimizations of the same idea.

Index

Version: 1.3.0