On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 5:33 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 October 2011 20:15, Arnaud Delobelle <arnodel@gmail.com> wrote:
That article states that Python has coroutines as of 2.5 -- that's incorrect, isn't it?
Generator functions + trampoline = coroutines
If I understand, the cofunctions of this thread aren't coroutines as such, they are something intended to make writing coroutines easier in some way. My problem is that it's not at all obvious how they help. That's partly because the generator+trampoline idiom, although possible, is not at all common so that there's little in the way of examples, and even less in the way of common understanding, of how the idiom works and what problems there are putting it into practice.
I highly recommend reading the article Mark Shannon linked earlier in the thread. I confess I didn't finish the whole thing, but even the first half of it made me realise *why* coroutine programming in Python (sans Stackless or greenlet) is such a pain: *every* frame on the coroutine stack has to be a generator frame in order to support suspending the generator. When a generator calls into an ordinary function, suspension is not possible until control has returned to the main generator frame. What this means is that, for example, if you want to use generators to implement asynchronous I/O, every layer between your top level generator and the asynchronous I/O request *also* has to be a generator, or the suspension doesn't work properly (control will be returned to the innermost function frame, when you really want it to get all the way back to the scheduler). PEP 380 (i.e. "yield from") makes it easier to *create* those stacks of generator frames, but it doesn't make the need for them to go away. Proceeding further down that path (as PEP 3152 does) would essentially partitioning Python programming into two distinct subsets: 'ordinary' programming (where you can freely mix generators and ordinary function frames) and 'generator coroutine' programming (where it *has* to be generators all the way down to get suspension to work). In some ways, this is the situation we have now, where people using Twisted and other explicitly asynchronous libraries have to be continuously aware of the risk of inadvertently calling functions that might block. There's no way to write I/O functions that internally say "if I'm in a coroutine, suspend with an asynchronous I/O request, otherwise perform the I/O request synchronously". Frankly, now that I understand the problem more clearly, attempting to attack it by making it easier to create stacks consisting entirely of generator frames strikes me as a terrible idea. Far better to find a way to have a dynamic "non-local" yield construct that yields from the *outermost* generator frame in the stack, regardless of whether the current frame is a generator or not. Ideally, we would like to make it possible to write code like this: def coroutine_friendly_io(*args, **kwds): if in_coroutine(): return coyield AsychronousRequest(async_op, *args, **kwds) else: return sync_op(*args, **kwds) If you look at the greenlet docs (http://packages.python.org/greenlet/) after reading the article on Lua's coroutines, you'll realise that greenlet implements *symmetric* coroutines - you have to explicitly state which greenlet you are switching to. You can then implement asymmetric coroutines on top of that by always switching to a specific scheduler thread. A more likely model for Python code would be Lua's *asymmetric* coroutines. With these, you couldn't switch to another arbitrary coroutine. Instead, the only thing you could do is suspend yourself and return control to the frame that originally invoked the coroutine. Some hypothetical stacks may help make this clearer: Suspending nested generators with 'yield from': scheduler() --> result = outer_gen.next() --> yield from inner_gen() --> yield 42 After the yield is executed, our stack looks like this: outer_func() The generator stack is gone - it was borrowing the thread's main stack, so suspending unwound it. Instead, each generator *object* is holding a reference to a suspended frame, so they're all kept alive by the following reference chain: outer_func's frame (running) -> outer_gen -> outer_gen's frame (suspended) -> inner_gen -> inner_gen's frame (suspended) There's no object involved that has the ability to keep a *stack* of frame's alive, so as soon as you get an ordinary function on the stack inside the generator, you can't suspend any more. Now, suppose we had greenlet style symmetric coroutines. You might do something like this: scheduler_greenlet() # (Could use the implicit main greenlet, but I think this makes the example clearer) --> result = outer_greenlet.switch() # The scheduler_greenlet.switch() call below returns here outer_greenlet() # Separate stack, not using the thread's main frame stack --> inner_func() # Can have ordinary function frames on the stack --> scheduler_greenlet.switch(42) # Suspends this greenlet Finally, Lua style asymmetric coroutines might look like this: outer_func() --> result = outer_codef.next() # The "coyield" below comes back here outer_codef() # Separate stack, not using the thread's main frame stack --> inner_func() # Just an ordinary function call --> coyield 42 # Actually suspends the whole coroutine To achieve 'natural' coroutine programming, a Lua style asymmetric coroutine approach looks the most promising to me. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia