Re: Async not always easy
Aside from shelling out, Python also has fully-working dll/so support, with the ctypes library or one of its pretty wrappers, saving even more overhead versus spinning up an executable and parsing its stdout. Practically all of the important libraries have cpu-intensive operations in compiled .pyd (which is just a dll/so), and quite a few wrappers exist to call out to standard libs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
