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

Processes


Threads and coroutines are concurrency models that coexist with the Python GIL and the leverage execution time left available by I/O operations to allow other tasks to continue. With modern multicore systems, it's great to be able to use the full power that the system provides by involving real parallelism and distributing the work across all the cores that are available.

The Python standard library provides very refined tools to work with multiprocessing, which is a great solution to leverage parallelism on Python. As multiprocessing will lead to multiple separate interpreters, the GIL won't get in the way, and compared to threads and coroutines, it might even be easier to reason with them as totally isolated processes that need to cooperate, rather than to think of multiple threads/coroutines within same system sharing the underlying memory state.

The major cost in managing processes is usually the spawn cost and the complexity of having to ensure you don't fork subprocesses in...