[Python-Dev] threading.Semaphore()'s counter can become negative for non-ints (original) (raw)

T.B. bauertomer at gmail.com
Mon Jan 30 23:11:04 CET 2012

On 2012-01-30 20:52, Guido van Rossum wrote:

TB, what's your use case for passing a float to a semaphore? Semaphores are conceptually tied to integers. You've kept arguing a few times now that the workaround you need are clumsy, but you've not explained why you're passing floats in the first place. A "fractional resource" just doesn't sound like a real use case to me.

Not an example from real life and certainly not one that can't be worked around; rather a thing that caught my eyes while looking at Lib/threading.py: Say you have a "known" constant guaranteed bandwidth and you need to split it among several connections which each of them take a known fixed amount of bandwidth (no more, no less). How many connections can I reliably serve? TOTAL_BANDWIDTH/BANDWIDTH_PER_CONNECTION. Well, actually int(_)...

Side note: If someone really want a discrete math implementation of a semaphore, you can replace _value with a list of resources. Then you check in acquire() "while not self._resources:" and pop a resource. In that case when a semaphore is used as a context manager it can have a useful 'as' clause. To me it seems too complicated for something that should be simple like a semaphore.

Regards, TB

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