Nathaniel has done a great job of drawing parallels between go and goto.

I've been stung, time and again by asyncio.create_task() swallowing exceptions[1], and functions not telling callers about background tasks[2].

For others looking to NOT rewrite all their code using a 3rd party event loop, here's a simple reproduction of nursery's behaviour in raw asyncio -

Hopefully, this will help lift the curse of asyncio :)

[EDIT] A library is also available - https://github.com/Tygs/ayo (with amazing operator overload)

  async def main():
      async with Nursery() as ny:
          ny.start_soon(a_1(), a_2(), ..., a_n())
          ny.start_soon(b_1(), b_2(), ..., b_n())
          .
          .
          .
          ny.start_soon(x_1(), x_2(), ..., x_n())


  class Nursery:
      def __init__(self):
          self.tasks = set()
  
      def start_soon(self, *coros: typing.Coroutine):
          for coro in coros:
              self.tasks.add(asyncio.create_task(coro))
  
      async def __aenter__(self):
          return self
  
      async def __aexit__(self, *args):
          try:
              while self.tasks:
                  tasks = self.tasks
                  self.tasks = set()
  
                  done, pending = await asyncio.wait(
                      tasks, return_when=asyncio.FIRST_COMPLETED
                  )
  
                  try:
                      for task in done:
                          await task
                  finally:
                      self.tasks |= pending
          finally:
              for task in self.tasks:
                  task.cancel()

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60287285/starlette-async...

[2] https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/947