Awaitable

We say that an object is an awaitable object if it can be used in an await expression. Many asyncio APIs are designed to accept awaitables.

There are three main types of awaitable objects: coroutines, Tasks, and Futures.

Coroutines

Python coroutines are awaitables and therefore can be awaited from other coroutines:

import asyncio

async def nested():
    return 42

async def main():
    # Nothing happens if we just call "nested()".
    # A coroutine object is created but not awaited,
    # so it *won't run at all*.
    nested()

    # Let's do it differently now and await it:
    print(await nested())  # will print "42".

asyncio.run(main())

Important

In this documentation the term “coroutine” can be used for two closely related concepts:

• a coroutine function: an async def function;

• a coroutine object: an object returned by calling a coroutine function.

asyncio also supports legacy generator-based coroutines.

Tasks

Tasks are used to schedule coroutines concurrently.

When a coroutine is wrapped into a Task with functions like asyncio.create_task() the coroutine is automatically scheduled to run soon:

import asyncio

async def nested():
    return 42

async def main():
    # Schedule nested() to run soon concurrently
    # with "main()".
    task = asyncio.create_task(nested())

    # "task" can now be used to cancel "nested()", or
    # can simply be awaited to wait until it is complete:
    await task

asyncio.run(main())

Futures

A Future is a special low-level awaitable object that represents an eventual result of an asynchronous operation.

When a Future object is awaited it means that the coroutine will wait until the Future is resolved in some other place.

Future objects in asyncio are needed to allow callback-based code to be used with async/await.

Normally there is no need to create Future objects at the application level code.

Future objects, sometimes exposed by libraries and some asyncio APIs, can be awaited:

async def main():
    await function_that_returns_a_future_object()

    # this is also valid:
    await asyncio.gather(
        function_that_returns_a_future_object(),
        some_python_coroutine()
    )

A good example of a low-level function that returns a Future object is loop.run_in_executor().

Running an asyncio Program

​asyncio.run(coro, *, debug=False) #New in version 3.7

Execute the coroutine coro and return the result.

This function runs the passed coroutine, taking care of managing the asyncio event loop, finalizing asynchronous generators, and closing the threadpool.

This function cannot be called when another asyncio event loop is running in the same thread.

If debug is True, the event loop will be run in debug mode.

This function always creates a new event loop and closes it at the end. It should be used as a main entry point for asyncio programs, and should ideally only be called once.

Example:

async def main():
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    print('hello')

asyncio.run(main())

run() inner use loop.run_until_complete() to start event loop, Changed in version 3.9: Updated to use loop.shutdown_default_executor().