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pythoneventsasynchronoustwistedgevent
Michael B
Michael B

Reputation: 289

Gevent's libev, and Twisted's reactor

I'm trying to figure out how Gevent works with respect to other asynchronous frameworks in python, like Twisted.

The key difference between Gevent and Twisted is that Gevent uses greenlets and monkey patching the standard library for an implicit behavior and a synchronous programming model whereas Twisted requires specific libraries and callbacks for an explicit behavior. The event loop in Gevent is libev/libevent, which is written in C, and the event loop in Twisted is the reactor, which is written in python.

Is there anything special about libev/libevent that allows for this implicit behavior? Why not use an event loop written in Python? Conversely, why isn't Twisted using libev/libevent? Is there any particular reason? Maybe it was simply a design choice and could have gone either way...

Theoretically, can Gevent's libev be replaced with another event loop, written in python, like Twisted's reactor? And can Twisted's reactor be replaced with libev?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 431

Answers (1)

Pithikos
Pithikos

Reputation: 20360

Short answer: Twisted is a network framework. Gevent tries to act as a library without requiring from the programmer to change the way he programs. That's their focus.. and not so much how that is achieved under the hood.

Long answer:

All asyncio libraries (Gevent, Asyncio, etc.) work pretty much the same:

  1. Have a main loop running endlessly on a single thread.
  2. When an event occurs, it's captured by the main loop.
  3. The main loop decides based on different rules (scheduling) if it should continue checking for events or switch temporarily and give control to any subscriber functions to the event.

greenlet is a different library. It's very simple in that it just changes the order that Python code is run and lets you change jumping back and forth between functions. Gevent uses it under the hood to implement its async features.

asyncio which comes with Python3 is like gevent. The big difference is the interface again. It requires the programmer to mark functions with async and allow him to explicitly wait for a subscribed function in the main loop with await.

Gevent is like asyncio. But instead of the keywords it patches existing code where appropriate. It uses greenlet under the hood to switch between main loop and subscribed functions and make it all work seamlessly.

Twisted as mentioned feels more like a framework than a library. It requires the programmer to follow very specific ways to achieve concurrency. Again though it has a main loop under the hood called reactor like everything else.

Back to your initial question: You can in theory replace the reactor with any loop (including gevent). But that would defeat the purpose. Probably Twisted's team decided to use their own version of a main loop for optimisation reasons. All these libraries use different scheduling in their main loops to meet their needs.

Upvotes: 0

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