Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

ThreadPools


Threads have been, historically, the most common way to achieve concurrency within software.

In theory, when the system allows, these threads can achieve real parallelism, but in Python, the Global Interpreter Lock (GLI) doesn't allow threads actually to leverage multicore systems, as the lock will allow a single Python operation to proceed at any given time.

For this reason, threads are frequently undervalued in Python, but in fact, even when the GIL is involved, they can be a very convenient solution to run I/O operations concurrently.

While using coroutines, we would need a run loop and some custom code to ensure that the I/O operation proceeds in parallel. Using threads, we can run any kind of function within a thread and, if that function does some kind of I/O, such as reading from a socket or from a disk, the other threads will proceed in the meantime.

One of the major drawbacks of threads is the cost of spawning them. That's frequently stated as one of the reasons why coroutines...