aiowire 1.0.0

A simple event loop using asyncio

This package implements a EventLoop class that manages concurrent coroutines.

It is based on the principles of functional reactive programming and draws inspiration from Haskell’s Control.Wire library.

In particular, every co-routine started by the event loop is a Wire.

Wire-s either return None, indicating they’re done, or another Wire.

An example helps explain the idea:

from aiowire import EventLoop

event = 0
async def show_event(ev) \
        -> Optional[Callable[[EventLoop],Awaitable]]:
    print("Running...")
    event += 1
    await asyncio.sleep(event*0.15)
    print(f"Event {event}")
    if event < 5:
        return show_event

async with EventLoop(timeout=1) as event:
    event.start(show_event)
    event.start(show_event)

We start up an event loop and drop in two wires. Each runs, then returns the show_event function. The event loop runs those functions next… and so on.

But this isn’t functional programming. The wires have access to the event loop, and can start more tasks. Easy, right?

What can I do with it?

What if you have a server that’s spawning programs, working with sockets, and managing timeouts? Drop in one wire for each program, one polling on socket I/O, and another acting as a timer (as above).

The canonical task types are thus:

asyncio.create_subprocess_exec # run a process

asyncio.sleep # awake the loop after a given time lapse

zmq.asyncio.Poller.poll # awake the loop after I/O on socket/file
# Note: see aiowire.Poller for a nice interface.

Now your sockets can launch programs, and your program results can start/stop sockets, and everyone can start background tasks.

Poller?

The Poller class lets you schedule callbacks in response to socket or file-descriptor activity. Of course, the callbacks are wires, and run concurrently.

Tell me more

Yes, you could just send async functions taking one argument to EventLoop.start, but where’s the fun in writing closures everywhere?

To take it to the next level, aiowire comes with a Wire convenience class that lets you write Wire-s expressively. The following class extensions help you make Wire-s out of common programming idioms:

• Wire(w): acts like an identity over “async func(ev):” functions

• Repeat(w, n): repeat wire w n times in a row

• Call(fn): call fn, ignore the return, and exit

Consider, for example, printing 4 alarms separated by some time interval:

from aiowire import EventLoop, Call

prog = ( Call(asyncio.sleep, 0.1) >> Call(print, 'beep\a') ) * 4

async with EventLoop() as ev:
    ev.start(prog)