Any code or blog written by Adam is worth spending some time on.
It will be interesting to see how the tasks framework develops and expands. I am sad to see the great Django-Q2 lumped in with the awful Celery though.
OP here, thanks for the praise!
Yeah, I mentioned Celery due to its popularity, no other reason ;)
You are a great writer - thanks for putting this together!
I'm of the opinion that django task apps should only support a single backend. For example, django-rq for redis only. There's too many differences in backends to make a good app that can handle multiple. That said, I've only used celery in production before, and I'm willing to change my mind.
I’m currently stuck with the tech debt of Celery myself. I understand that! Does Django Tasks support async functions?
Why is celery awful?
Celery is great and awful at the same time. In particular, because it is many Python folks' first introduction to distributed task processing and all the things that can go wrong with it. Not to mention, debugging can be a nightmare. Some examples:
- your function arguments aren't serializable
- your side effects (e.g. database writes) aren't idempotent
- discovering what backpressure is and that you need it
- losing queued tasks during deployment / non-compatible code changes
There's also some stuff particular to celery's runtime model that makes it incredibly prone to memory leaks and other fun stuff.
Honestly, it's a great education.
It's okay till it's not. Everyone I know who had Celery in production was looking for a substitution (custom or third-party) on a regular basis. Too many moving pieces and nuances (config × logic × backend), too many unresolved problems deep in its core (we've seen some ghosts you can't debug), too much of a codebase to understand or hack. At some point we were able to stabilize it (a bunch of magic tricks and patches) and froze every related piece; it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ).
Because it’s a seducer. It does what you need to do and you two are happy together. So you shower more tasks on Celery and it becomes cold and non-responsive at random times.
And debugging is a pain in the ass. Most places I’ve been that have it, I’ve tried to sell them on adding Flower to give better insight and everyone thinks that’s a very good idea but there isn’t time because we need to debug these inscrutable Celery issues.
Template partials look good, which is one of the key reasons frameworks like React are as good and popular as they are, because you can reuse small segments of code.
The most obvious value here is for HTMX, which requires a lot of partial templates.
Amazing that Django didn't have this until 2025
Key benefit for reusability and composability in React is IMHO that they don't use templates at all, but everything is a function.
React allows for encapsulation of state in a reusable component, its more than just templating.
I'm an avid HTMX user but never did I ever think "I'm using so many includes, I wish I didn't have to use include so much."
What I would like is a way to cut down the sprawl of urls and views.
I do a check for `request.htmx` in my views and conditionally return a template partial as needed. This reduced my need for one-off view functions that were only returning partials for htmx. Works pretty well from my experience.
Partialdef inline is the real win. Lets you define parts of a page without needing to place them in another file. Reduces the mental overhead of imagining how the inclusion will look because it’s already there.
The use case is mainly driven by htmx where you will have lots of these partials and the view code renders them as individual responses.
indeed the vintage templating was a logical bottleneck
How is it different from include? Just less files from my perspective
The "inline partials" feature is neat, means you can use and define a partial at the same time.
The way you can render just a named partial from both the render() shortcut and the include tag is nice too:
Yeah, but I was doing the same thing 10 years ago with include mixed with extends and blocks. I can just include a file inside a template or render it directly.
I asked the same question
There've been a variety of open source attempts at this idea. Is this official one now the best to use, or are the others still compelling?
It makes me sad when a secondary meaning, which does not even overcome the main meaning in usage, becomes an obstacle for the normal use of a word. It's like seeing a rainbow as a sexualized symbol not fit for children, because it also happens to be used by LGBTQ+ community. (BTW, since you're a Brit: did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?)
I mean, it is sad. But unfortunately that is what happened with "master", "slave", "whitelist", and "blacklist". No reasonable person construed these as offensive or having any implications about the wider world. But there are people in our profession who are determined to take offense where none is given, and unfortunately they got their way.
Well, "slave" has a pretty direct main meaning of an oppressed person doing forced labor. The word "master" is much milder in this regard (compare "master's degree" and "slave's degree"). The word "nonce" in normal usage seems even more removed from any pejorative secondary meanings.
We don't need to bring this kind of thing up. We're not school children and most of us are technology professionals, so the meaning is clear.
These guidelines are relevant here:
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. ... name collisions ... . They're too common to be interesting.
That didn't stop people from throwing a fit over master-slave terminology in software (having nothing to do with slavery), going so far as to rename long-standing development branch names, as well as put significant effort into removing such terms from the code itself and any documentation.
Any code or blog written by Adam is worth spending some time on.
It will be interesting to see how the tasks framework develops and expands. I am sad to see the great Django-Q2 lumped in with the awful Celery though.
OP here, thanks for the praise!
Yeah, I mentioned Celery due to its popularity, no other reason ;)
You are a great writer - thanks for putting this together!
I'm of the opinion that django task apps should only support a single backend. For example, django-rq for redis only. There's too many differences in backends to make a good app that can handle multiple. That said, I've only used celery in production before, and I'm willing to change my mind.
I’m currently stuck with the tech debt of Celery myself. I understand that! Does Django Tasks support async functions?
Why is celery awful?
Celery is great and awful at the same time. In particular, because it is many Python folks' first introduction to distributed task processing and all the things that can go wrong with it. Not to mention, debugging can be a nightmare. Some examples:
- your function arguments aren't serializable - your side effects (e.g. database writes) aren't idempotent - discovering what backpressure is and that you need it - losing queued tasks during deployment / non-compatible code changes
There's also some stuff particular to celery's runtime model that makes it incredibly prone to memory leaks and other fun stuff.
Honestly, it's a great education.
It's okay till it's not. Everyone I know who had Celery in production was looking for a substitution (custom or third-party) on a regular basis. Too many moving pieces and nuances (config × logic × backend), too many unresolved problems deep in its core (we've seen some ghosts you can't debug), too much of a codebase to understand or hack. At some point we were able to stabilize it (a bunch of magic tricks and patches) and froze every related piece; it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ).
Because it’s a seducer. It does what you need to do and you two are happy together. So you shower more tasks on Celery and it becomes cold and non-responsive at random times.
And debugging is a pain in the ass. Most places I’ve been that have it, I’ve tried to sell them on adding Flower to give better insight and everyone thinks that’s a very good idea but there isn’t time because we need to debug these inscrutable Celery issues.
https://flower.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Computer, load up Celery Man please.
Template partials look good, which is one of the key reasons frameworks like React are as good and popular as they are, because you can reuse small segments of code.
The most obvious value here is for HTMX, which requires a lot of partial templates.
Amazing that Django didn't have this until 2025
Key benefit for reusability and composability in React is IMHO that they don't use templates at all, but everything is a function.
React allows for encapsulation of state in a reusable component, its more than just templating.
They're a neat design. I started using them on my blog the other day as part of trying out Django 6: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/faec3532183...
But you could already reuse templates in Django by including them. What am I missing?
Check out the HTMX example in the blog, this helped me better understand how it could be used
https://adamj.eu/tech/2025/12/03/django-whats-new-6.0/#rende...
I'm an avid HTMX user but never did I ever think "I'm using so many includes, I wish I didn't have to use include so much."
What I would like is a way to cut down the sprawl of urls and views.
I do a check for `request.htmx` in my views and conditionally return a template partial as needed. This reduced my need for one-off view functions that were only returning partials for htmx. Works pretty well from my experience.
Partialdef inline is the real win. Lets you define parts of a page without needing to place them in another file. Reduces the mental overhead of imagining how the inclusion will look because it’s already there.
The use case is mainly driven by htmx where you will have lots of these partials and the view code renders them as individual responses.
indeed the vintage templating was a logical bottleneck
How is it different from include? Just less files from my perspective
The "inline partials" feature is neat, means you can use and define a partial at the same time.
The way you can render just a named partial from both the render() shortcut and the include tag is nice too:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/ref/templates/language...
Yeah, but I was doing the same thing 10 years ago with include mixed with extends and blocks. I can just include a file inside a template or render it directly.
I asked the same question
There've been a variety of open source attempts at this idea. Is this official one now the best to use, or are the others still compelling?
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153116
[flagged]
Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word
It makes me sad when a secondary meaning, which does not even overcome the main meaning in usage, becomes an obstacle for the normal use of a word. It's like seeing a rainbow as a sexualized symbol not fit for children, because it also happens to be used by LGBTQ+ community. (BTW, since you're a Brit: did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?)
I mean, it is sad. But unfortunately that is what happened with "master", "slave", "whitelist", and "blacklist". No reasonable person construed these as offensive or having any implications about the wider world. But there are people in our profession who are determined to take offense where none is given, and unfortunately they got their way.
More to your point, yes, taking offense can be turned into a weapon: https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...
Well, "slave" has a pretty direct main meaning of an oppressed person doing forced labor. The word "master" is much milder in this regard (compare "master's degree" and "slave's degree"). The word "nonce" in normal usage seems even more removed from any pejorative secondary meanings.
We don't need to bring this kind of thing up. We're not school children and most of us are technology professionals, so the meaning is clear.
These guidelines are relevant here:
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. ... name collisions ... . They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
American hegemony, and all that.
In the US they spell it as nonze.
No we don't.
Pretty positive that was a joke/bait…
It absolutely was a joke
Slightly absurdist non-sensical humour I’ll admit, but none the less, a joke :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context
That didn't stop people from throwing a fit over master-slave terminology in software (having nothing to do with slavery), going so far as to rename long-standing development branch names, as well as put significant effort into removing such terms from the code itself and any documentation.