Episode 19: Async hacks, unicorns and velociraptors

core.py

In this asynchronous episode we're interviewing a fellow core developer Yury Selivanov to talk about asyncio's past and future, composable design, immutability, and databases you'd actually like using. We also broke the 2-hour episode barrier!

## Timestamps

(00:00:00) INTRO

(00:01:33) PART 1: INTERVIEW

(00:02:27) What drives you?

(00:04:47) How do you choose what to work on?

(00:08:10) Hyperfocus

(00:09:28) Things from Rust that Python could use

(00:14:50) Nothing is sacred when you depend on glibc

(00:18:47) TypeScript typing is god-tier

(00:22:04) Adding async and await to Python

(00:34:11) Adding new keywords to the language

(00:41:17) Jumping into a new codebase

(00:49:22) Any design regrets?

(00:58:46) Contextvars

(01:10:40) Is the frozenmap PEP happening?

(01:19:21) uvloop

(01:23:25) What makes Gel lovable?

(01:39:57) PART 2: PR OF THE WEEK

(01:47:08) Saturday talks at PyCon should be fun

(01:50:35) PART 3: WHAT'S GOING ON IN CPYTHON

(01:50:47) Ken Jin's tail-call interpreter

(01:55:05) Barney Gale's glob.glob() optimization

(01:55:43) Brandt's boolean guards to narrow types to values in the JIT

(01:56:33) Mark Shannon's stack limits implemented with addresses, not counters

(01:58:34) Brandt's removal of _DYNAMIC_EXIT

(01:58:53) Mark Shannon's async for branches instrumented

(01:59:36) Free-threading changes

(01:59:58) Sam Gross' regression tests can now run in --parallel-threads

(02:00:34) Tomasz Pytel's thread safety crusade

(02:01:01) Xuanteng Huang's __annotations__ race fix

(02:01:11) Kumar's per-thread linked lists for tasks

(02:02:54) Serhiy's crashes related to PySys_GetObject() fixed

(02:03:22) Sam's usage of stack pointers in thread stack traversal

(02:03:38) Dino Viehland's lock avoidance during object cleanup

(02:04:23) OUTRO