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Even if you want to ‘fire and forget’, it’s still essential to keep a reference to the task, otherwise it can be garbage collected mid-execution:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#asyncio....

Wow! Did not know this, guess I’ve got a couple fixes to make…

One coroutine crashing and the others continuing to send it messages without noticing was my $40,000 bug.

I’m so confused by this architecture. It makes total sense in a threaded world but why would you want a coroutine constantly scheduling itself in a loop to pull messages off a queue like thing than just having the thing generating the message fire off a task to process it directly right there? It feels almost the same to me and then you can’t crash the coroutine.

At some point even those tasks must be cleanly stopped and unless you want to play erlang and "let it crash", the actors have a lifecycle as well. Making it explicit will avoid much pain, and ease testing a lot. Also it will make resources consumption more predictable.