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

Answer 1

I liked the concurrence Python module which relies on either Stackless Python microthreads or Greenlets for light-weight threading. All blocking network I/O is transparently made asynchronous through a single libevent loop, so it should be nearly as efficient as an real asynchronous server.

I suppose it's similar to Eventlet in this way.

The downside is that its API is quite different from Python's sockets/threading modules; you need to rewrite a fair bit of your application (or write a compatibility shim layer)

Edit: It seems that there's also cogen, which is similar, but uses Python 2.5's enhanced generators for its coroutines, instead of Greenlets. This makes it more portable than concurrence and other alternatives. Network I/O is done directly with epoll/kqueue/iocp.

Answer 2

There is a good book on the subject: "Twisted Network Programming Essentials", by Abe Fettig. The examples show how to write very Pythonic code, and to me personally, do not strike me as based on a bloated framework. Look at the solutions in the book, if they aren't clean, then I don't know what clean means.

My only enigma is the same I have with other frameworks, like Ruby. I worry, does it scale up? I would hate to commit a client to a framework that is going to have scalability problems.