How to properly create and run concurrent tasks using python's asyncio module?

Question

I am trying to properly understand and implement two concurrently running Task objects using Python 3\'s relatively new asyncio module.

In a nutshell, asyncio seems

Answer 1

You don't necessarily need a yield from x to give control over to the event loop.

In your example, I think the proper way would be to do a yield None or equivalently a simple yield, rather than a yield from asyncio.sleep(0.001):

import asyncio

@asyncio.coroutine
def say_boo():
  i = 0
  while True:
    yield None
    print("...boo {0}".format(i))
    i += 1

@asyncio.coroutine
def say_baa():
  i = 0
  while True:
    yield
    print("...baa {0}".format(i))
    i += 1

boo_task = asyncio.async(say_boo())
baa_task = asyncio.async(say_baa())

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_forever()

Coroutines are just plain old Python generators. Internally, the asyncio event loop keeps a record of these generators and calls gen.send() on each of them one by one in a never ending loop. Whenever you yield, the call to gen.send() completes and the loop can move on. (I'm simplifying it; take a look around https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/3.4/Lib/asyncio/tasks.py#l265 for the actual code)

That said, I would still go the run_in_executor route if you need to do CPU intensive computation without sharing data.