asyncio

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with asyncio, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Hard to guarantee resource cleanup in finally blocks2025-09-02
Hard to figure out what goes wrong as code grows more complex2025-01-09
Default asyncio event loop behaves unintuitively, requiring developers to remember details on each create_task2023-02-11
Silent crashes and swallowed exceptions make asyncio programs hard to debug2022-01-11
Async code requires rewriting everything with new keywords, making it harder to follow than threads2021-05-10
Asyncio is complex and confusing, so the commenter hasn't used it2020-05-25
API is so bad it is almost impossible to use correctly2019-05-19
Older event loop API is cumbersome and hard to get right2019-02-10
API exposes loop and task lifecycle too much, making it complex to use2018-08-08
Hard to find fixes in the documentation when running into problems2018-08-08
Internals are opaque and docs lacking, forcing developers to read source code to understand behavior2016-11-07
Asyncio's new syntax is hard for beginners and experienced coders2015-09-24