Worker interface

[willmcgugan]

The work decorator possibly makes it too easy to create threads.

If you don't know what you are doing (and sometimes even if you do) threads can be a footgun. I think we should make launching threads more explicit.

I think the decorator should accept a thread argument which will create a thread worker if set to True.

Without thread=True it should be an error to decorate a non-coroutine.

i.e. the following should be an error:

@work
def foo(...):
    ...

To create a thread, it should be this:

@work(thread=True)
def foo(...):
    ...

This should create a thread worker:

@work
async def foo(...):
    ...

Note, this is a breaking change, which should be reflected in the CHANGELOG. It will also require an update to the docs.

[davep]

Also note this will need an update to DirectoryTree.

[willmcgugan]

As an addendum. We should also be able to run a coroutine in a thread.

Should be a small update to workers. Essentially you want to call asyncio.run( ) within the thread.

@work(thread=True)
async def foo(...):
    ...

[davep]

Might also be worth looking at #2946 while working on this.

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