Python processing

Author:	R Oudkerk
Contact:	roudkerk at users.berlios.de
Url:	http://developer.berlios.de/projects/pyprocessing
Licence:	BSD Licence

processing is a package for the Python language which supports the spawning of processes using the API of the standard library's threading module. It runs on both Unix and Windows.

Objects can be transferred between processes using pipes or queues, and objects can be shared between processes using a server process or (for simple data) shared memory. Equivalents of the synchronization primitives in threading are also provided.

Links

The package can be downloaded from

Examples

The processing.Process class follows the API of threading.Thread. For example

from processing import Process, Queue

def f(q):
    q.put('hello world')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    q = Queue()
    p = Process(target=f, args=[q])
    p.start()
    print q.get()
    p.join()

Synchronization primitives like locks, semaphores and conditions are available, for example

>>> from processing import Condition
>>> c = Condition()
>>> print c
<Condition(<RLock(None, 0)>), 0>
>>> c.acquire()
True
>>> print c
<Condition(<RLock(MainProcess, 1)>), 0>

One can also use a manager to create shared objects either in shared memory or in a server process, for example

>>> from processing import Manager
>>> manager = Manager()
>>> l = manager.list(range(10))
>>> l.reverse()
>>> print l
[9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0]
>>> print repr(l)
<Proxy[list] object at 0x00E1B3B0>