Making The Sans I/O Ideal A Reality For The Websockets Library

The Python Podcast.__init__

• Episode: Making The Sans I/O Ideal A Reality For The Websockets Library
• Website: The Python Podcast.__init__
• Feed URL: https://www.podcastinit.com/feed/mp3/
• Duration: 00:38:04
• Published: 2021-01-26 01:31

Working with network protocols is a common need for software projects, particularly in the current age of the internet. As a result, there are a multitude of libraries that provide interfaces to the various protocols. The problem is that implementing a network protocol properly and handling all of the edge cases is hard, and most of the available libraries are bound to a particular I/O paradigm which prevents them from being widely reused. To address this shortcoming there has been a movement towards "sans I/O" implementations that provide the business logic for a given protocol while remaining agnostic to whether you are using async I/O, Twisted, threads, etc. In this episode Aymeric Augustin shares his experience of refactoring his popular websockets library to be I/O agnostic, including the challenges involved in how to design the interfaces, the benefits it provides in simplifying the tests, and the work needed to add back support for async I/O and other runtimes. This is a great conversation about what is involved in making an ideal a reality.