Fire and Forget at Textual

If you read my Fire and Forget (or Never) about Python and asynchronous programming, you could think it’s a super odd edge case. But a reader/listener, Richard, pointed me at Will McGugan’s article The Heisenbug lurking in your async code. This is basically the same article, but in Will-style. Will does say “This behavior is well documented, as you can see from this excerpt.” True, but the documentation got this emphasis and warning in Python 3.12 whereas the feature create_task was added in Python 3.6/3.5 timeframe. So it’s not just a matter of did we read the docs carefully. It’s a matter of did we reread the docs carefully, years later? Luckily Will added some nice concrete numbers I didn’t have: https://github.com/search?q=%22asyncio.create_task%28%22&type=code This appears in over 0.5M separate code files on GitHub. To be clear, not every search result for create_task uses the fire-and-forget pattern, but just on the first page of resu