Comment by gpderetta

But the asyncio event loop is not reentrant, so your faux sync functions cannot be safely called from other async functions. It is an extremely leaky abstraction. This is not a theoretical possibility, I stumbled on the issue 15 minutes into my foray into asyncio (turns out that jupyter notebooks use asyncio internally).

There are ways around that (spawn a separate thread with a dedicated event loop, then block), or monkey patch asyncio, but they are all ugly.