Wednesday, 12th May 2021
New Major Versions Released! Flask 2.0, Werkzeug 2.0, Jinja 3.0, Click 8.0, ItsDangerous 2.0, and MarkupSafe 2.0. Huge set of releases from the Pallets team. Python 3.6+ required and comprehensive type annotations. Flask now supports async views, Jinja async templates (used extensively by Datasette) “no longer requires patching”, Click has a bunch of new code around shell tab completion, ItsDangerous supports key rotation and so much more.
Async functions require an event loop to run. Flask, as a WSGI application, uses one worker to handle one request/response cycle. When a request comes in to an async view, Flask will start an event loop in a thread, run the view function there, then return the result.
Each request still ties up one worker, even for async views. The upside is that you can run async code within a view, for example to make multiple concurrent database queries, HTTP requests to an external API, etc. However, the number of requests your application can handle at one time will remain the same.