From 7f7b45dc54757d9d451be0b3816f8f8481143c7f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Bryan Newbold <bnewbold@robocracy.org>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2020 15:51:06 -0800
Subject: proposal: python3.7 upgrade

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+
+status: planning
+
+If we update fatcat python code to python3.7, what code refactoring changes can
+we make? We currently use/require python3.5.
+
+Nice features in python3 I know of are:
+
+- dataclasses (python3.7)
+- async/await (mature in python3.7?)
+- type annotations (python3.5)
+- format strings (python3.6)
+- walrus assignment (python3.8)
+
+Not sure if the walrus operator is worth jumping all the way to python3.8.
+
+While we might be at it, what other superficial factorings might we want to do?
+
+- strict lint style (eg, maximum column width) with `black` (python3.6)
+- logging/debugging/verbose
+- type annotations and checking
+- use named dicts or structs in place of dicts
+
+## Linux Distro Support
+
+The default python version shipped by current and planned linux releases are:
+
+- ubuntu xenial 16.04 LTS:  python3.5
+- ubuntu bionic 18.04 LTS:  python3.6
+- ubuntu focal  20.04 LTS:  python3.8 (planned)
+- debian buster 10 2019:    python3.7
+
+Python 3.7 is the default in debian buster (10).
+
+There are apt PPA package repositories that allow backporting newer pythons to
+older releases. As far as I know this is safe and doesn't override any system
+usage if we are careful not to set the defaults (aka, `python3` command should
+be the older version unless inside a virtualenv).
+
+It would also be possible to use `pyenv` to have `virtualenv`s with custom
+python versions. We should probably do that for OS X and/or windows support if
+we wanted those. But having a system package is probably a lot faster to
+install.
+
+## Dataclasses
+
+`dataclasses` are a user-friendly way to create struct-like objects. They are
+pretty similar to the existing `namedtuple`, but can be mutable and have
+methods attached to them (they are just classes), plus several other usability
+improvements.
+
+Most places we are throwing around dicts with structure we could be using
+dataclasses instead. There are some instances of this in fatcat, but many more
+in sandcrawler.
+
+## Async/Await
+
+Where might we actually use async/await? I think more in sandcrawler than in
+the python tools or web apps. The GROBID, ingest, and ML workers in particular
+should be async over batches, as should all fetches from CDX/wayback.
+
+Some of the kafka workers *could* be aync, but i'm not sure how much speedup
+there would actually be. For example, the entity updates worker could fetch
+entities for an editgroup concurrently.
+
+Inserts (importers) should probably mostly happen serially, at least the kafka
+importers, one editgroup at a time, so progress is correctly recorded in kafka.
+Parallelization should probably happen at the partition level; would need to
+think through whether async would actually help with code simplicity vs. thread
+or process parallelization.
+
+## Type Annotations
+
+The meta-goals of (gradual) type annotations would be catching more bugs at
+development time, and having code be more self-documenting and easier to
+understand.
+
+The two big wins I see with type annotation would be having annotations
+auto-generated for the openapi classes and API calls, and to make string
+munging in importer code less buggy.
+
+## Format Strings
+
+Eg, replace code like:
+
+    "There are {} out of {} objects".format(found, total)
+
+With:
+
+    f"There are {found} out of {total} objects"
+
+## Walrus Operator
+
+New operator allows checking and assignment together:
+
+    if (n := len(a)) > 10:
+        print(f"List is too long ({n} elements, expected <= 10)")
+
+I feel like we would actually use this pattern *a ton* in importer code, where
+we do a lot of lookups or cleaning then check if we got a `None`.
+
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