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

Futures


When a background task is spawned, it might be running concurrently with your main flow forever and never complete its own job (such as the worker threads of a ThreadPool), or it might be something that will return a result to you sooner or later and you might be waiting for that result (such as a thread that downloads the content of a URL in the background).

These second types of task all share a common behavior: their result will be available in _future_. So, a result that will be available in the future is commonly referred to as Future. Programming languages don't all share the same exact definition of futures, and on Python Future is any function that will be completed in the future, typically returning a result.

Future is the callable itself, so it's unrelated to the technology that will be used actually to run the callable. You will need a way to let the execution of the callable proceed, and in Python, that's provided by Executor.

There are executors that can run the futures...