No-async async with Python¶
A (reasonable) criticism of async is that it tends to proliferate in your code. In order to await something, your functions must be async all the way up the call-stack. This tends to result in you making things async just to support that one call that needs it or, worse, adding async just-in-case. Given that going from def to async def is a breaking change there is a strong incentive to go straight there.
Textual is an async framework, but doesn't require the app developer to use the async and await keywords (but you can if you need to). This post is about how Textual accomplishes this async-agnosticism.
But first, an apology! In a previous post I said Textual "doesn't do any IO of its own". This is not accurate. Textual responds to keys and mouse events (Input) and writes content to the terminal (Output).
Although Textual clearly does do IO, it uses asyncio mainly for concurrency. It allows each widget to update its part of the screen independently from the rest of the app.
