Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Currently pdb does not know anything about asyncio, even though it's a feature officially supported for a long time. I will add supports for asyncio in roughly 3 steps (does not have to be exact 3 PRs):

1. pdb will generate some passive info for asyncio. If the user hits a breakpoint inside an asyncio task, there will be a one line message with the current stack indicating which task the user is in. A convenience variable$_asynctask will be added to refer to the current task.
2. pdb will provide a way for the user to examine all the tasks in the current event loop with a new command. The user can inspect how many tasks are there and their status. Maybe they can even check the frames for each task.
3. pdb will enable users to switch between tasks, aka letting users to specify "run until I'm in this task".pdb will also possibly provide a way for the users to cancel the task.

In theory, many of the features are already possible with manual code aspdb can execute arbitrary code anyway. However, I believe it's helpful for the users to have a more convenient way to debug their async programs.

This was briefly mentioned in the language summit at PyCon this year, no one objected (maybe because they have other stuff that they were more against :) ).

This should not impact any user experience with the existing code that not involves asyncio.

If you have any other suggestions or objections, please let me know.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

No response given

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-121468: Show asyncio information in pdb #124367
• gh-121468: Fix the doctest failure for asyncio test on pdb #131258
• gh-121468: Ensure PDB cleans up event loop policies after using asyncio. #131388
• gh-121468: Support async breakpoint in pdb #132576