asyncio forking a task

[devnull]

I have googled and searched the forums but can't find an answer.

Very new to asyncio, but is it possible to fork a task as you can with a thread ?

If so, does anybody have a code snippet ?

[pythoncoder]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. It's possible to launch multiple instances of a task: in this example four instances of the toggle task are launched (with different args).

[devnull]

Hi Peter;

What I mean is to launch a task and let it run on it's own and then be able to continue to use the repl as you can with threads.

Kind of fire and forget ?!

[pythoncoder]

This query seems to come up regularly; I'm puzzled why people want to run a background task on a microcontroller. I'd be interested to hear about applications for this.

But, to answer your question, (u)asyncio doesn't work like that. When you run

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loop.run_forever()

or

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loop.run_until_complete(my_coro())

uasyncio runs and monopolises the MicroPython VM. There is nothing magic about uasyncio: it's just Python code and it takes over from the REPL until complete. As Python code I'd recommend to those interested to take a look and see how it works. It's clever but not impenetrable

I see no reason why you shouldn't run a uasyncio application as a thread, but I haven't tried this.