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

Answer 1

Kamaelia hasn't been mentioned yet. Its concurrency model is based on wiring together components with message passing between inboxes and outboxes. Here's a brief overview.

Answer 2

None of these solutions will avoid that fact that the GIL prevents CPU parallelism - they are just better ways of getting IO parallelism that you already have with threads. If you think you can do better IO, by all means pursue one of these, but if your bottleneck is in processing the results nothing here will help except for the multiprocessing module.

Answer 3

Whizzer is a tiny asynchronous socket framework that uses pyev. Its very fast, primarily because of pyev. It attempts to provide a similiar interface as twisted with some slight changes.

Answer 4

I've started to use twisted for some things. The beauty of it almost is because it's "bloated." There are connectors for just about any of the main protocols out there. You can have a jabber bot that will take commands and post to an irc server, email them to someone, run a command, read from an NNTP server, and monitor a web page for changes. The bad news is it can do all of that and can make things overly complex for simple tasks like the OP explained. The advantage of python though is you only include what you need. So while the download may be 20mb, you may only include 2mb of libraries (which is still a lot). My biggest complaint with twisted is although they include examples, anything beyond a basic tcp server you're on your own.

While not a python solution, I've seen node.js gain a lot more traction as of late. In fact I've considered looking into it for smaller projects but I just cringe when I hear javascript :)

Answer 5

You are welcome to have a look at PyWorks, which takes a quite different approach. It lets object instances run in their own thread and makes function call's to that object async.

Just let a class inherit from Task instead of object and it is async, all methods calls are Proxies. Return values (if you need them) are Future proxies.

res = obj.method( args )
# code continues here without waiting for method to finish
do_something_else( )
print "Result = %d" % res # Code will block here, if res not calculated yet

PyWorks can be found on http://bitbucket.org/raindog/pyworks

Answer 6

Also try Syncless. It's coroutine-based (so it's similar to Concurrence, Eventlet and gevent). It implements drop-in non-blocking replacements for socket.socket, socket.gethostbyname (etc.), ssl.SSLSocket, time.sleep and select.select. It's fast. It needs Stackless Python and libevent. It contains a mandatory Python extension written in C (Pyrex/Cython).