Reports / July 2018

Work over July has continued pushing forward with ASGI. I’ve also taken on a small amount of freelancing to cover costs.

In particular there’s been lots of work on Uvicorn, sharpening up the implementation, ensuring graceful process shutdowns and restarts, guarding against poorly behaving clients and invalid server behaviors.

There’s some pretty extensive documentation available now at https://www.uvicorn.org

I’ve also put more work into the ASGI toolkit, Starlette. Static files support in particular is one big headline there. https://github.com/encode/starlette

Outcomes I’d like to see from this:

Getting Uvicorn to the point where it can be recommended in the Django Channels documentation.
Maturing the ASGI ecosystem to the point that it becomes worth considering introducing an ASGI interface and middleware for Django. This could eventually get us to the point where Django developers to work in a threaded environment by default, with view code typically running within a threadpool, but have the ability to switch to async in particular, targeted cases.
Putting in the groundwork for an ecosystem of high-throughput Python frameworks and tooling to thrive.

The community now has 3 ASGI servers available: Daphne, Uvicorn, and Hypercorn. I think we’re probably about at the point where the Channels documentation could be highlighting all three.

There’s plenty more work to do on Uvicorn right now, including improving the quality of the websocket implementation, HTTP 2.0 support, optional support for running under trio rather than under asyncio, and built-in multiprocess support / process supervision. This is likely where work during August will continue to focus.

As ever, thanks to all our sponsors, contributors, and users for your ongoing support.

— Tom Christie, 1st August, 2018.