[Python-Dev] Simple coroutines? (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Aug 25 18:13:46 CEST 2004

At 02:51 PM 8/25/04 +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:

"Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com>:

> If you could throw a special kind of exception (or even a regular > exception), and call traceback.resume() to pick up execution at the > point where it was thrown, whether thrown by a generator or a > regular function. Actually, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make exceptions resumable -- provided all the frames in between are Python. If the exception gets thrown through any C calls, though, resumption becomes impossible. Some other structure is needed to hold the state of a resumable C call.

Unfortunately, as was discussed on the previous Stackless thread, nearly all Python bytecodes pass through C on their way to other Python code.

The trick is to be able to figure out whether the return value of a given frame is being put onto the value stack of its parent frame. In principle, you could tell this from the operation being performed at the current opcode pointer in the parent frame, and the prior contents of the value stack. In practice, the eval loop sometimes messes with the value stack prior to the call (e.g. to optimize method calls), and in the case of e.g try/finally and try/except, it's going to execute other stuff in the frame before the exception is passed up to the next frame.

So, to make it work,the interpreter loop would need to be particular about putting the stack back to the way it was before the current instruction began, when an exception occurs. Also, it would need to not invoke except/finally clauses for one of these special exceptions, or else have a way of restoring the frame to its pre-exception state, which seems arbitrarily complex. I guess it would have to treat the resumable exception as if a YIELD operation took place.

I'm going to have to think about this one some more, but it seems to me that it would be much easier to add bidirectional communication to generators to create a coroutine type, than to try to implement resumable exceptions.

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