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

Chapter 2. Parallelize It

Concurrency and parallelism are two concepts that are commonly confused. The reality, though, is that they are quite different, and if you designed software to be concurrent when instead you needed parallel execution, then you could be seriously impacting your software's true performance potential.

Due to this, it's vital to know exactly what the two concepts mean so that you can understand the differences. Through knowing these differences, you'll be putting yourself at a distinct advantage when it comes to designing your own high performance software in Python.

In this chapter, we'll be covering the following topics:

  • What is concurrency and what are the major bottlenecks that impact our applications
  • What is parallelism and how does this differ from concurrency
  • The different styles of computer system architecture and how we can utilize these effectively, using either concurrency or parallelism
  • A brief overview of computer memory architecture