Python 3.5 async/await with real code example

If a third-party library is not compatible with async/await then obviously you can’t use it easily. There are two cases:

1. Let’s say that the function in the library is asynchronous and it gives you a callback, e.g.

   def fn(..., clb):
       ...
   

   So you can do:

   def on_result(...):
       ...
   
   fn(..., on_result)
   

   In that case you can wrap such functions into the asyncio protocol like this:

   from asyncio import Future
   
   def wrapper(...):
       future = Future()
       def my_clb(...):
           future.set_result(xyz)
       fn(..., my_clb)
       return future
   

   (use future.set_exception(exc) on exception)

   Then you can simply call that wrapper in some async function with await:

   value = await wrapper(...)
   

   Note that await works with any Future object. You don’t have to declare wrapper as async.

2. If the function in the library is synchronous then you can run it in a separate thread (probably you would use some thread pool for that). The whole code may look like this:

   import asyncio
   import time
   from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
   
   # Initialize 10 threads
   THREAD_POOL = ThreadPoolExecutor(10)
   
   def synchronous_handler(param1, ...):
       # Do something synchronous
       time.sleep(2)
       return "foo"
   
   # Somewhere else
   async def main():
       loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
       futures = [
           loop.run_in_executor(THREAD_POOL, synchronous_handler, param1, ...),
           loop.run_in_executor(THREAD_POOL, synchronous_handler, param1, ...),
           loop.run_in_executor(THREAD_POOL, synchronous_handler, param1, ...),
       ]
       await asyncio.wait(futures)
       for future in futures:
           print(future.result())
   
   with THREAD_POOL:
       loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
       loop.run_until_complete(main())
   

If you can’t use threads for whatever reason then using such a library simply makes entire asynchronous code pointless.

Note however that using synchronous library with async is probably a bad idea. You won’t get much and yet you complicate the code a lot.