Support async/await in cells

[ianschmitz]

Description

It would be great to support await within a cell.

For example it would be great to do something like:

from my_lib import func_from_my_lib

await func_from_my_lib()

Currently it gives an error:

line 1 SyntaxError: 'await' outside function

The motivation for this is being able to interact with existing async functions from a marimo notebook. Presumably if this was supported I could create async functions within the notebook as well.

Suggested solution

Allow await within a cell. A possible implementation may look like (note my Python is quite rusty):

asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(cell())

This would assume that the cell was defined using async def instead of def like it is today.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[akshayka]

Thanks for the feature request -- we can explore this. In the meantime, even though it's inconvenient, is it possible for you to use asyncio directly to run async functions? For example,

import marimo

__generated_with = "0.1.77"
app = marimo.App()


@app.cell
def __(asyncio):
    async def foo():
        await asyncio.sleep(2)
        print('done sleeping')
    return foo,


@app.cell
def __(asyncio, foo):
    asyncio.run(foo())
    return


@app.cell
def __():
    import asyncio
    return asyncio,


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

[ianschmitz]

Yes that works @akshayka. Not as ergonomic as having proper support but it is functional!

[ianschmitz]

Closed in #795.