Sanic vs Tornado: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Sanic and Tornado are both asynchronous web frameworks for Python. While they share the common goal of providing efficient and high-performance web development, there are key differences between the two.

1. Routing and Handler Approach: Sanic follows a decorator-based approach for routing and handling requests, allowing for easy and intuitive handling of different routes. Tornado, on the other hand, utilizes a class-based approach where specific handlers are defined for different URLs. This provides more flexibility in defining custom request handlers.

2. Web Server Performance: Sanic is known for its exceptional performance, specifically designed to handle high loads and concurrent operations efficiently. It utilizes asynchronous I/O and non-blocking requests to maximize throughput. Tornado also excels in performance, but it is more suitable for heavy computational tasks rather than high-concurrency web serving.

3. Middleware Support: While both frameworks support middleware, Sanic offers more flexibility and convenience in this aspect. Sanic allows middleware to be defined at the application level, route level, or as a group. Tornado, on the other hand, provides a global middleware approach where all requests go through a single pipeline.

4. Community and Ecosystem: Tornado has been around for a longer time, resulting in a larger and more mature community and ecosystem. It has a wide range of extensions, libraries, and tools built around it, making it easier to find solutions and leverage existing resources. Sanic, being a younger framework, has a smaller community and ecosystem, but it has been gaining popularity due to its performance and simplicity.

5. Built-in Features: Tornado includes built-in features like WebSocket and coroutine-based non-blocking I/O, which make it ideal for real-time applications. Sanic, on the other hand, provides built-in features like HTTP/2 support, request validation, and request parameter conversion, making it more suitable for modern web development.

6. Documentation and Learning Curve: Tornado has comprehensive and well-documented resources available, making it easier for beginners to start learning. Sanic, although it has improved its documentation, still has room for improvement in terms of comprehensiveness. As a result, Tornado may have a slightly lower learning curve for newcomers.

In summary, Sanic and Tornado differ in their routing and handling approach, web server performance, middleware support, community and ecosystem, built-in features, and documentation. These differences make each framework suitable for specific use cases based on requirements and priorities.