Which I read as "I have no experience whatsoever with modern python, and async is something that catches water".
Async is typically less prone to error and complexity than thread code, and also typically faster/lighter for io (in python). I can't see a reason for this not to be the case in other languages too.
In terms of error-proneness, I would say the hierarchy is this:
Actors < CSP ~ Async << Threads
In terms of "getting started" difficulty, I would put the order like this:
Async < Actors ~ CSP < Threads
In terms of first-order maintainability in large projects I would put the order like this:
Actors >> CSP ~ Threads > Async
Async is on its face easy to grok, and saves you a ton of problems with locking and the like, and you can run it on a single threaded system with the right type of dispatcher. However, small amounts of complexity rapidly devolve into towers of async calls that cannot be untangled from a spaghetti pile, and there's not really satisfying ways of figuring out how to unwind error-handling in async, except for the basic case of "I truly don't care if this async fails".
I will say though, it's spectacularly easy to write messy and garbage code in all four of these concurrency models (I certainly have). My preference for actors comes from four opinions:
- some systems (if you want to be flippant, microservices architecture) use actors to encapsulate failure domains, which is really fantasic, and truly the #1 reason to use actors
- 99.8% of the time no need to write mutexes, and good actor systems basically won't deadlock unless you really try hard. (also true for async system btw)
- gives you an organizational framework to write well-designed and well-engineered systems.
- with a small amount of discipline "not having a spaghetti ball" scales with complexity (I find it takes a lot of discipline to not have a spaghetti ball with async in the more complex cases)
The async stack traces I've come across in Python are extremely simple to grok. I've never had something I couldn't figure out. (Using aiohttp, aoipg, asyncpg).
I can't even say the same for synchronous Django. Sometimes it's just the quality of the tool you're using, not the higher-level concept it implements.
You can trivially implement async on top of actors, (like exists in Elixir's Task module), and generally most async in elixir should go through that model. But if you're in python-land you really don't know what you're missing. In elixir, my tests autopartition the state so that each test exists in it's own "universe in the multiverse", so I can run concurrent, async integration tests with stubs, database transactions, even http requests that exit the vm (through chromedriver) and come back, finding their own correct partition of the test mockset and database state, and I have a few custom extensions to the multiverse system like process registries, and global pubsub channels. We're talking hundreds of highly concurrent integration tests that run through completion in seconds.
