[Python-Dev] Coroutines and PEP 380 (original) (raw)

Greg greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Jan 19 22:41:17 CET 2012

Glyph wrote:

[Guido] mentions the point that coroutines that can implicitly switch out from under you have the same non-deterministic property as threads: you don't know where you're going to need a lock or lock-like construct to update any variables, so you need to think about concurrency more deeply than if you could explicitly always see a 'yield'.

I'm not convinced that being able to see 'yield's will help all that much. In any system that makes substantial use of generator-based coroutines, you're going to see 'yield from's all over the place, from the lowest to the highest levels. But that doesn't mean you need a correspondingly large number of locks. You can't look at a 'yield' and conclude that you need a lock there or tell what needs to be locked.

There's no substitute for deep thought where any kind of theading is involved, IMO.

-- Greg

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