PEP 525 suggested that adding aiter() and anext() would need to wait until async __aiter__ is dropped in 3.7. Issue 31709 solved that, so now it would be possible to add them.

Guido, do we need a PEP to add aiter() and anext() builtins?

> do we need a PEP to add aiter() and anext() builtins?

No, just this tracker issue, a PR and a reviewer. (Sorry, I can't review
CPython code myself any more.)

> No, just this tracker issue, a PR and a reviewer. (Sorry, I can't review
CPython code myself any more.)

Alright, I'll work on a PR after PEP 55x.

I attempted to make a Python implementation (attached) to use in my code. There are a few questions in the comments.

One of the complications is the async equivalent of next with two arguments like next(iterator, default). It cannot return the result of __anext__() because it needs to catch StopAsyncIteration. So it should return an awaitable wrapper instead (in my Python code this is rendered as a coroutine). A secondary question is whether the default value should be returned as it is passed, or awaited on.

Do these really need to be builtins?

They seem too specialized to be widely useful; I've personally never needed them in any async code I've written. It would make more sense to me to put them in a module like operators.

> Do these really need to be builtins?

We're only beginning to see async iterators being used in the wild, so we can't have a definitive answer at this point.

> They seem too specialized to be widely useful; I've personally never needed them in any async code I've written. It would make more sense to me to put them in a module like operators.

I think putting them to the operators module makes sense, at least for 3.8.  Do you want to work on a pull request?

Updating the issue title to reflect the decision to add these to the operator module rather than to built-ins.

Submitted a PR here: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/8895

Great, thanks! There's someone working on a pr to add them as builtins (so that pr is in C). I'll have to take a look when i'm back from vacation at that pr too, before we can make a decision. 

I've been to europython, pycon ru, and pybay conferences recently and the number of people who want these as builtins was surprisingly high.

Interesting, thanks Yury!

I only saw the discussion here which implied these wouldn't go directly into builtins for 3.8 (and I searched here and in GitHub, and couldn't find the PR you mentioned either), so I'm curious if that was tracked somewhere. It'd be unfortunate if the work I did on that PR couldn't be used, but I'd be even happier to have these as builtins.

Thanks again for reviewing when you're back, and have a wonderful vacation in the meantime!

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0525/#aiter-and-anext-builtins kinda promised `aiter` and `anext` built-ins.

This ticket seems idle.

Perhaps it's time for the decider club to either remove that language from PEP-525 or make a plan for aiter/anext?

If the deciders prefer to have these in the operator module for 3.8 (as Yury and Jelle requested above), my PR from a few months ago which implements this (https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/8895) can still be merged with no conflicts. I don't think any other changes to that patch are requested before it can be merged (i.e. it's only stalled on the decision whether to add these to builtins or operator), but I can still make time to address any new requested code changes if these are to go in operator.

If these are to go in builtins instead, @nanjekyejoannah has volunteered to pick that up. So it seems like this can move forward one way or the other once we have a decision on operator vs. builtins.

Might as well re-target for 3.10 as 3.9 seems feature-complete now.

Adding this would be a nice compliment to aclosing(), which was already merged for 3.10.

Otherwise, witness the ugliness of using aclosing() with an async iterable object:

    async with aclosing(foo.__aiter__()) as agen:
        async for item in agen:
            ...

I'd like:

    async with aclosing(aiter(foo)) as agen:
        async for item in agen:
            ...

Nice to see there is still interest in this from someone else! Thanks, John. Are any core developers still interested in this?

If I can get a new PR together that adds C implementations of `aiter` and `anext` to builtins, would a committer still be interested in reviewing the patch?

A week from Friday, I'll have a rare and precious opportunity to spend the day contributing to open source. I have a bunch of different things I could work on, but would work on this if there is still interest. Thanks and hope this finds you all well.

Please see https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/23847 for the C implementation of aiter and anext added to builtins, as requested.

I don't have anything to add to this beside the name choice is safe and won't clash with anything (but honestly I would prefer it to be discussed on the ML before implementing something after 3 years). I checked a limited dataset to search for aiter and only found examples from 2 different projects. Elastic have something for themselves and the other usages are coming from the tests of aioitertools.
https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py/blob/5fe9ff721ce493fbf2fc8b94d5ab02fc7e55fd5a/elasticsearch/_async/helpers.py#L85-L96

New changeset f0a6fde8827d5d4f7a1c741ab1a8b206b66ffd57 by Joshua Bronson in branch 'master':
bpo-31861: Add aiter and anext to builtins (#23847)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/f0a6fde8827d5d4f7a1c741ab1a8b206b66ffd57

New changeset d9692027f41ee7600fe401c066617ebfc8bac930 by Pablo Galindo in branch 'master':
bpo-31861: Complete the C-API docs for PyObject_GetAiter and PyAiter_Check (GH-25004)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/d9692027f41ee7600fe401c066617ebfc8bac930

New changeset 919d42d477093154a30b55d9d79f023dbbe5614a by Pablo Galindo in branch 'master':
bpo-31861: Fix possible crash in PyAnextAwaitable_New (GH-25005)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/919d42d477093154a30b55d9d79f023dbbe5614a

I reopen the issue.

The commit f0a6fde8827d5d4f7a1c741ab1a8b206b66ffd57 introduced a reference leak:

$ ./python -m test -R 3:3 test_asyncgen

0:00:00 load avg: 4.75 Run tests sequentially
0:00:00 load avg: 4.75 [1/1] test_asyncgen
beginning 6 repetitions
123456
......
test_asyncgen leaked [72, 72, 72] references, sum=216
test_asyncgen leaked [30, 30, 30] memory blocks, sum=90
test_asyncgen failed

== Tests result: FAILURE ==

1 test failed:
    test_asyncgen

Total duration: 6.0 sec
Tests result: FAILURE

New changeset a02683ac38183fa3a45c32319dfd329c5e622f0e by Pablo Galindo in branch 'master':
bpo-31861: Fix reference leak in builtin_anext_impl() (GH-25008)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/a02683ac38183fa3a45c32319dfd329c5e622f0e

Fixed by PR25008

A bug was reported in anext(): https://bugs.python.org/issue43751

I proposed to PR 25266 to rename PyAnextAwaitable_Type to _PyAnextAwaitable_Type, and to initialize the type at Python startup: can someone please have a look?