Feature: asyncio executor

[nadavelkabets]

Motivation

Current wait_set based executors are highly inefficient and don’t integrate cleanly with Python’s asyncio ecosystem.
Examples of inefficiencies in the wait_set executor:

• Reoccurring construction of the wait set
• Revisiting blocked tasks every iteration
• Busy looping while a callback group is blocking

Advantages of integrating with asyncio:

• Better support for asynchronous code – take advantage of many existing features like call_later(), sleep(), and task exception handling
• Easy integration with large Python libraries – FastAPI, pyserial-asyncio, pytransitions, aiohttp, python-can, etc.
• High performance – asyncio is already far more optimized than the existing wait_set executor, and libraries like uvloop are available for even higher performance, matching the current cpp implementation of the EventsExecutor
• Reduction in code duplication - lower maintenance costs and library complexity by transitioning to a built in event loop implementation

Proposed Implementation

• Shared dispatch logic Re-use the existing Python executor’s “take_entity” functions to pull items from the queue.

• Timers via asyncio
  Replace the DelayedEventsThread with loop.call_at().

• AbstractExecutor base class
  Define an AbstractExecutor (similar to asyncio.AbstractEventLoop) to unify typing across Executor, EventsExecutor, and AsyncioExecutor.

Related Issues & PRs

• #1234 – async wait/sleep implementation
• #1098 – Tasks that raise an exception crash the entire executor
• #962 – Runtime error when a long async callback is triggered
• #1395 – Ignore exceptions raised in user-created tasks
• #971 – Enable limited use of asyncio with executors