Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By : Elliot Forbes
Book Image

Learning Concurrency in Python

By: Elliot Forbes

Overview of this book

Python is a very high level, general purpose language that is utilized heavily in fields such as data science and research, as well as being one of the top choices for general purpose programming for programmers around the world. It features a wide number of powerful, high and low-level libraries and frameworks that complement its delightful syntax and enable Python programmers to create. This book introduces some of the most popular libraries and frameworks and goes in-depth into how you can leverage these libraries for your own high-concurrent, highly-performant Python programs. We'll cover the fundamental concepts of concurrency needed to be able to write your own concurrent and parallel software systems in Python. The book will guide you down the path to mastering Python concurrency, giving you all the necessary hardware and theoretical knowledge. We'll cover concepts such as debugging and exception handling as well as some of the most popular libraries and frameworks that allow you to create event-driven and reactive systems. By the end of the book, you'll have learned the techniques to write incredibly efficient concurrent systems that follow best practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Threads in Python


Before we jump into more detail about the life of a thread, I feel it's important to know what we are going to be instantiating in real terms. In order to know this, however, we'll need to have a look at Python's Thread class definition which can be found in threading.py.

Within this file, you should see the class definition for the Thread class. This has a constructor function which looks something like this:

# Python Thread class Constructor
def __init__(self, group=None, target=None, name=None,
args=(), kwargs=None, verbose=None):

This preceding constructor takes in five real arguments, which are defined within that class definition as follows:

  • group: This is a special parameter which is reserved for a future extension.
  • target:This is the callable object to be invoked by the run() method. If not passed, this will default to None, and nothing will be started.
  • name:This is the thread name.
  • args:This is the argument tuple for target invocation. It defaults to ().
  • kwargs: This is...