Nathaniel,
You’re quite right, I can’t work out the race condition myself now... Is it
possible that an AutoResetEvent is just an Event with a two-line wait()
overload???
Richard
From: Nathaniel Smith
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 5:10 PM
To: Richard Whitehead
Cc: Python-Ideas
Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Simpler thread synchronization using "Sticky
Condition"
On Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 09:50 Richard Whitehead <richard.whiteh...@ieee.org>
wrote:
Nathaniel,
Thanks very much for taking the time to comment.
Clearing the event after waiting for it will introduce a race condition: if
the sender has gone around its loop again and set the semaphore after we
have woken but before we've cleared it.
Sounds fine to me. Why is that a problem? Can you write down an example of how
two threads could be interleaved to produce incorrect results?
As you said, this stuff is tricky!
The only safe way is to make the wait-and-clear atomic, which can be done
with a lock; and this comes essentially back to what I'm proposing.
I realise this is not a fundamental new primitive - if it was, I wouldn't be
able to build it in pure Python - but I've found it extremely useful in our
generic threading and processing library.
You're right about what you say regarding queues; I didn't want to go into
the full details of the multi-threading and multi-processing situation at
hand, but I will say that we have a pipeline of tasks that can run as either
threads or processes, and we want to make it easy to construct this
pipeline, "wiring" it as necessary; combining command queues with data
queues just gets a real mess.
But you're effectively implementing a multi-producer single-consumer Queue
anyway, so without any details it's hard to guess why using a Queue would be
messier. I know you don't want to get into too many details, but if the whole
motivation for your proposal is based on some details then it's usually a good
idea to explain them :-).
-n
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