# Python asyncio

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Python asyncio and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Ships with Python, so it is free and stable; people praise its API quality and performance. Critics most often say it makes code hard to navigate and untangle.

## Why people recommend it

- Stable, mature, well documented (2 comments): "It's been a stable (and documented) behavior of the Python standard library for almost a decade now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631502)) "I'm deeply satisfied and surprised by the maturity, quality of APIs and performance in general" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49490015))
- Simpler code than thread pools (2 comments): "design the application from the start with asyncio in mind, it makes things much simpler" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912131)) "asyncio.gather is a lot less code than having to manage a thread pool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282827))

## What people warn about

- Buggy, broken design with shared state (4 comments): "the first time I tried to use asyncio I ran into a bug that nobody knew how to solve" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492402)) "you essentially combine an asynchronous model with mutable shared state" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063245)) ""Python + Asyncio" is a buggy code as well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49677982))
- Hard to untangle and navigate (3 comments): "Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440190)) "I feel there's just too much to navigate to quickly get up and running" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056444)) "I still can't believe what a mess async python is." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801894))
- Painful and confusing to use (2 comments): "it used decorators and wrapping my head around how it was a crazy abuse of generators" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285979)) "it was very much "painful" (to borrow the article's verbage) to use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285690))
- Surprising semantics, not truly async (2 comments): "And in the end, async is not even really async, just cooperative execution." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496361)) "calling an async function doesn't even schedule it (by default)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258189))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tokio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tokio.md): 57 recommend
- [Akka](https://hackerapproved.com/p/akka.md): 12 recommend
- [ZIO](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zio.md): 11 recommend
- [Trio Python library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trio.md): 10 recommend
- [core.async](https://hackerapproved.com/p/core-async.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Python asyncio", https://hackerapproved.com/p/asyncio/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).