> where some framework is probably already handling the main event loop
This is both not really true and also irrelevant. When you need a flask (or whatever) request handler to do parallel work, asyncio is still pretty bullshit to use vs threads.
And the amount of contorting that has to be done for it in Python would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.
> Most JS projects
I don't know what JavaScript does, but I do know that Python is not JavaScript.
> You want to manage your own thread pool for this...
In Python, concurrent futures' ThreadPoolExecutor is actually nice to use and doesn't require rewriting existing worker code. It's already done, has a clean interface, and was part of the standard library before asyncio was.
If you have async stuff happening all over the place, what do you use, a global ThreadPoolExecutor? It's not bad, but a bit more cumbersome and probably less efficient. You're running multiple OS threads that are locking, vs a single-threaded event loop. Gets worse the more long-running blocking calls there are.
Also, I was originally asking about free threads. GIL isn't a problem if you're just waiting on I/O. If you want to compute on multiple cores at once, there's multiprocessing, or more likely you're using stuff like numpy that uses C threads anyway.
Totally agree, concurrent.futures strikes a great balance. Enough to get work done, a bit more constrained than threads on their own.
Asyncio is a lot of cud to chew if you just want a background task in an otherwise sync application
