Generators and asyncio aren't idiomatic in clojure.

[amano-kenji]

Generator

lazy-seq creates ISeqable which is Iterable. A generator is also Iterable.

lazy-seq is a traditional solution that has worked well. The following generator is somehow redundant.

(defn gen
  (yield 1)
  (yield 2)
  (yield 3))

A lazy sequence can do the same job and be passed to any place where a python generator or a python iterator is expected if a lazy sequence is actually collections.abc.Iterable.

I think basilisp should eliminate yield.

Asyncio

The whole async API is criticized by some python programmers. Gevent does the job by monkey-patching blocking I/O operations and running them in its own green threads. One can get a lazy sequence out of a green thread.

If you don't want to monkey-patch blocking I/O operations, you can also use a green thread library that offloads blocking I/O operations to a thread pool. Unbuffered channels can communicate between threads. Promesa does something similar on JVM. On javascript platforms, promesa doesn't have a thread pool because every I/O operation is non-blocking.

With a thread pool and unbuffered channels, an async value or an async iterator can be converted to synchronous constructs.

I'm just sketching a broad idea. Specific details will have to be fleshed out later.

Instead of supporting async, basilisp programmers can utilize green thread libraries.

Update: core.async seems to be a green thread library, and promesa's core.async implementation seems great. (basilisp.core.async.interop/async-iterator) and (basilisp.core.async.interop/coroutine) can convert async iterators and coroutines to channels with a thread pool and unbuffered channels.

[amano-kenji]

I'm promoting this discussion to issues.