nbrad

Returning to Python full-stack development after a stint with Node, it seems like using async/await is not widely adopted enough in the Python ecosystem to actually use?

In no particular order

- Django doesn’t have an async ORM? (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/topics/async/)

- Django Rest Framework has no async support? https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/issues/7260

- SQLModel’s section on async support basically says “docs coming soon”? Yet this is designed to be used with FastAPI? Why would the docs not start with async/await? https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/advanced/

- SqlAlchemy/asyncpg => you can’t use it if you’re using PgBouncer (necessary most of the time with Postgres) in transaction mode? What?? https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg/issues/1058

- Ubiquitous “requests” library used in most docs examples, no async support https://github.com/psf/requests

- Top package for GitHub REST API, no async support https://github.com/PyGithub/PyGithub

- …on and on…

What’s the point of my nice FastAPI server if nothing internally can use async/await? How is everyone else doing this?

/rant

I’m hoping for something battle-tested that supports async/await and migrations. If your answer is some variation of “real programmers don’t use ORMs”... fair enough, I suppose. But here are the options as I see them:

- Django: very mature ORM, migration support is great. But it doesn’t support async/await (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/topics/async/), and these days FastAPI seems like a better option. FastAPI just needs an ORM, so =>

- SQLModel: from @tiangolo who created FastAPI, clean and good Pydantic support, so this would be my default option, but even though it seems to support async/await the doc page is blank (https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/advanced/), and for migrations you resort to the underlying =>

- SQLAlchemy: seems by far the largest/best supported, has async/await, has migrations through Alembic (it seems not as fully-featured as Django’s?), but trying to use it has felt very kludgy/painful/verbose.

- Tortoise: the README claims to fulfill my dreams, but I haven’t met anyone yet using it in prod? Anyone have experience they can share?

- Any others I missed?

Meanwhile in the JS/TS ecosystem, Prisma just added preview support for JOINs 2 weeks ago (https://github.com/prisma/prisma/releases/tag/5.7.0 !?!) and yet it seems ubiquitous (though I hear everyone’s moving to Drizzle).

Advice greatly appreciated

A lot of devs I know are excited about Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) like GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, Codeanywhere, Coder, Replit, and CodeSandbox. They seem great, and simplify many aspects of the dev workflow: easy to onboard onto new projects, everyone on the project stays in sync, etc.

But I rarely hear of actual teams using them; it's usually individuals using CDEs for side projects.

Are you using a CDE at work? Would love to hear about your experience.