Summary

In this chapter, you learned about asynchronous programming, which is a model of programming that takes advantage of coordinating computing tasks to overlap the waiting and processing times. There are three main components to an asynchronous program: the event loop, the coroutines, and the futures. The event loop is in charge of scheduling and managing coroutines using its task queue. Coroutines are computing tasks that are to be executed asynchronously; each coroutine has to specify inside of its function exactly where it will give the execution flow back to the event loop (that is, the task-switching event). Futures are placeholder objects that contain the results obtained from the coroutines.

The asyncio module, together with the Python keywords async and await, provides an easy-to-use API and an intuitive framework to implement asynchronous programs; additionally, this framework makes the asynchronous code just as readable as synchronous code, which is generally quite rare in...