A clean, lightweight alternative to Python's twisted? [closed]

Answer 1

I wouldn't go as far as to call Twisted bloated, but it is difficult to wrap your head around. I avoided really settling in an learn for quite a while as I always wanted something a little easier for 'small tasks'.

However, now that I have worked with it some more I have to say having all the batteries included is VERY nice.

All the other async libraries I've worked with end being way less mature than they even appear. Twisted's event loop is solid.

I'm not quite sure how to solve the steep Twisted learning curve. It might help if someone would fork it and clean a few things up, like removing all the backwards compatability cruft and the dead projects. But that's the nature of mature software I guess.

Answer 2

I Confirm the goodness of syncless. It can use libev (the newer, cleaner and better performance version of libevent). A while ago it didn't have as much support as libevent, but now the development process is more advanced and syncless very useful.

Answer 3

gevent is eventlet cleaned up.

API-wise it follows the same conventions as the standard library (in particular, threading and multiprocessing modules) where it makes sense. So you have familiar things like Queue and Event to work with.

It only supports libevent (update: libev since 1.0) as reactor implementation but takes full advantage of it, featuring a fast WSGI server based on libevent-http and resolving DNS queries through libevent-dns as opposed to using a thread pool like most other libraries do. (update: since 1.0 c-ares is used to make async DNS queries; threadpool is also an option.)

Like eventlet, it makes the callbacks and Deferreds unnecessary by using greenlets.

Check out the examples: concurrent download of multiple urls, long polling webchat.

Answer 4

If you just want a Simplified, lightweight HTTP Request Library then I find Unirest really good

Answer 5

A really interesting comparison of such frameworks was compiled by Nicholas Piël on his blog: it's well worth a read!

Answer 6

Twisted is complex, you're right about that. Twisted is not bloated.

If you take a look here: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/trunk/twisted you'll find an organized, comprehensive, and very well tested suite of many protocols of the internet, as well as helper code to write and deploy very sophisticated network applications. I wouldn't confuse bloat with comprehensiveness.

It's well known that the Twisted documentation isn't the most user-friendly from first glance, and I believe this turns away an unfortunate number of people. But Twisted is amazing (IMHO) if you put in the time. I did and it proved to be worth it, and I'd recommend to others to try the same.