Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By : Quan Nguyen
Book Image

Mastering Concurrency in Python

By: Quan Nguyen

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages, with numerous libraries and frameworks that facilitate high-performance computing. Concurrency and parallelism in Python are essential when it comes to multiprocessing and multithreading; they behave differently, but their common aim is to reduce the execution time. This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to various advanced concepts in concurrent engineering and programming. Mastering Concurrency in Python starts by introducing the concepts and principles in concurrency, right from Amdahl's Law to multithreading programming, followed by elucidating multiprocessing programming, web scraping, and asynchronous I/O, together with common problems that engineers and programmers face in concurrent programming. Next, the book covers a number of advanced concepts in Python concurrency and how they interact with the Python ecosystem, including the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Finally, you'll learn how to solve real-world concurrency problems through examples. By the end of the book, you will have gained extensive theoretical knowledge of concurrency and the ways in which concurrency is supported by the Python language
Table of Contents (22 chapters)

The potential removal of the GIL from Python

You have learned that the GIL sets a significant constraint on our multithreading programs in Python, especially those with CPU-bound tasks. For this reason, many Python developers have come to view the GIL in a negative light, and the term "the infamous GIL" has started to become popular; it is not surprising that some have even advocated the complete removal of the GIL from the Python language.

In fact, multiple attempts to remove the GIL have been made by prominent Python users. However, the GIL is so deeply implanted in the implementation of the language, and the execution of most libraries and packages that are not thread-safe is so significantly dependent on the GIL, that the removal of the GIL will actually engender bugs as well as backward incompatibility issues for your Python programs. A number of Python developers...