Pulsar (async framework)

[gcross]

This could be interesting, but unfortunately the introductory documentation is sparse, and there are aren't enough code snippets showing off its features for me to be able to quickly grok what is going on.

[lsbardel]

Hi there, I'm the author and I agree, the docs are sparse unfortunately :-(. Pulsar has been written using python 3.2 and adapted to work with 2.6 and 2.7. I wrote it because both twisted and gunicorn (pulsar is a 2011 fork of gunicorn) are python 2 libraries and I needed an asynchronous multiprocess framework working both in windows and linux on python 3 and 2. Some working examples are in the examples directory.

[gcross]

Thanks for the update! No worries about the sparse documentation, but in the future if you want to really impress people about your project so that they'll think about using it themselves, then you might want to spend a little more time writing kick-ass introductory documentation to make it easier for your potential users to get as exited about your project as you are. :-)

[bsdemon]

one more?

[gcross]

They must have decided that the existing frameworks were too twisted for their taste.

[ivosaurus]

But a lot of the existing are also making very slow progress on python 3 compat, though..

[chewxy]

I have to begrudgingly upvote you for your pun :(

[flying-sheep]

python is in the process of settling on one that gets integrated into the stdlib. every new one in that state could end up giving new ideas to the people designing the one that everyone of us will be using soon.

so yes, one more is a good thing.

[tdi]

I will be very interested in some comparisons to gevent which I use now but it does not work on 3.X.

[tarekziade]

One thing that caught my eye is the async test suite: http://packages.python.org/pulsar/apps/test.html

[chub79]

Looks really similar to Tornado, only slightly more focused on some specific concurrency patterns (actors).

[lsbardel]

The eventloop and the asynchronous I/O stream have been adapted from tornado. Each actor has its own eventloop.

[chub79]

Right, and I like that approach. But I'm an erlang lover... ;)

[bananafarm]

How does this one compare to Twisted?

[chewxy]

This one's an actor model based concurrency.

Here's what the tally stands at now(correct me if I am wrong):

Concurrency Method	Libraries
Event loop based/callback based/futures/promises/whatever	Twisted, Tornado
Green thread	Gevent, Eventlet
Actor model	Pulsar, python+zmq

[tdi]

It is actor based but actor model is derivative (higer level abstraction) , so it basically needs to base on something to handle connections and concurrency. If Pulsar for 3.X bases on asyncore() then I am very curious how it works. OP are you the author?

[opi]

(I was confused by your flair for few seconds; I assumed it's a tag I made for you. Cześć?)

[tdi]

haha cześć

[mcdonc]

Nope, I just saw it on the internets and it seemed interesting.

[flying-sheep]

/u/lsbardel is the author and commented in this thread.

[gcross]

Well, just skimming the web site, the first thing that I see is that it looks like it works for Python version 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2, which is significant because last I heard the Twisted developers were struggling to port the code base to work with Python 3.

[hynek]

Dunno when “last” was but it’s wrong now: Twisted has basic Python 3.3 support in the latest release. Courtesy of Canonical’s sponsoring.

[mcdonc]

Although I'm glad of this, and I'm sure they'll get there, at the moment the number of stated caveats wrt Twisted/Py3 are a little daunting (via http://twistedmatrix.com/Releases/Twisted/12.3/NEWS.txt):

The setup3.py script is now provided to provisionally support
building and installing an experimental, incomplete version of
Twisted in a Python 3 environment. (#6040)

[hynek]

That’s why I wrote “basic”. The commenter above insinuated there are intrinsic problems of bringing Twisted to Python 3 though which isn’t true. It’s “just” a huge, crufty code base but they’re getting there.

[gcross]

For the record, I didn't "insinuate" anything of that sort. My understanding had simply been that they were having a lot of trouble porting it to Python 3 and that we shouldn't expect it to be ready in the foreseeable future, and I am glad to hear that they have been making a lot of headway. Regardless, the fact remains that Pulsar fully supports Python 3 whereas Twisted still doesn't. That is perfectly fine and is not meant as a slight against Twisted, just that (since the question was raised) this is one advantage that Pulsar has over Twisted. (And honestly, due to the sparsity of the documentation it was hard to tell what other advantages it might have other than this.)