It's always been possible to create realtime apps with Python. Callbacks have been available since the beginning, and frameworks like Tornado and Twisted have been doing something very similar to the new async/await functionality with generators since Python 2.5 (or maybe even older). The async/await keywords are a nice performance improvement and work in a few places that "yield" doesn't, but they're not adding fundamentally new capabilities.

> Does it mean that it will be possible to create realtime apps with python?

I'm not sure what you mean by realtime but usually real time means something else and requires more deterministic behavior.

If you mean applications that use non-blocking IO to great extent then yes, but this depends a lot on the ecosystem to provide libraries for async file io, database io and so on. The Python language left good infrastructure to use though.

> Now that WebAssembly is coming - doesn't it mean that it could be possible to create both backend and frontend for realtime apps in python?

Not anymore than we could before with asm.js unfortunately as seen in http://repl.it/languages/python3 the problem is wrapping and the library, I hope a company "picks up the glove" and makes "Python for the frontend", sharing Python code between backend and frontend could be amazing.

People have started to hijack the word realtime. It's truly sad, because now it just muddies up people's conversations. So now people have to ask, is it the one that keeps planes in the air or the one that makes sure your email badge counter updates.

It is unfortunate. In most cases you can assume until proven otherwise that when someone says "realtime" they mean "really really soft soft-realtime" (sometimes referred to as "flaccidtime") rather than hard- or soft-realtime. Who needs planes when you have Javascript?

I wish there was a better alternative term for the web sense that I could promote, just to help un-hijack the word before it gets out of control. But I don't know of one that is likely to succeed. 'Responsive' makes sense to me but it already has another meaning in the web world. What about something like 'reactive' or 'on-the-fly'? People will never go for 'near real-time' because it sounds too weak in terms of its advertising value. Someone else below me suggested 'push', which is pretty decent but again it's an overloaded term... Thoughts or suggestions? :)

I'm not much of a wordsmith, but I am leaning towards "forthcoming".

Yes, for better or for worse, "realtime" (and sometimes "near-realtime") are used in the web community to refer to push technology as opposed to time constraints.

"Will it be possible to use it instead of node.js?"

It's been possible to use Python instead of node.js since before node.js existed. And by "possible" I mean "tons of people have been shipping code", not just "it's theoretically possible but nobody does it".

Node ported a well-established existing technique to Javascript, it didn't invent it.

As for Django, I think this is an exciting idea: https://gist.github.com/andrewgodwin/b3f826a879eb84a70625

I don't know that it's possible to have a realtime application running in an interpreter (which makes no realtime guarantees as far as I know) running on top of a soft-at-best-realtime OS.