Python Generators - From Iterators to Cooperative Multitasking
A series of 3 posts about Python generators and cooperative multitasking.
Python is a language that in 11 years of life has been through a very remarkable development and the introduction of several new features, sometimes borrowed from other languages, sometimes arisen from the needs of developers and heavily discussed before being officially implemented. One of these improvements concerns generators, a concept which can be found in the computer science environment since the 70s; it has been implemented in Python from version 2.2 (2001) and became popular from version 2.3 (2003).
Generators are a generalization of functions that allow to deal in a more complete and rich way with iterations, repeated executions and in general with everything concerns the program flow. In the last years a concept which was considered obsolete started to spread again, namely that of cooperative multitasking. This concept has been shadowed for some years by the advent of multiprocessing and multithreading but, as happened to interpreted languages and virtual machines, as time passes and contexts change good ideas rise again and prove to be anything but dead.
In the Python world, in particular, numerous solutions have appeared which endorse the use of microthreads: these are parallel execution flows without implicit scheduling as opposed to what happens with traditional processes and threads. The big advantage of such objects is the ease of implementation and management of the multiprogramming code, since all synchronization and data protection problems simply do not exist. On the other hand, their use requires a voluntary scheduling, in other words a system that explicitly acquires and releases system resources.
Read the posts on The Digital Cat
Written by Leonardo Giordani
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