[stdlib-sig] futures - a new package for asynchronous execution

[Jesse Noller]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Brian Quinlan <brian at sweetapp.com> wrote:
> On Nov 7, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
>
>> 2009/11/6 Brian Quinlan <brian at sweetapp.com>:
>>>
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>> I'd like to propose adding a module/package to Python that makes it easy
>>> to
>>> parallelize arbitrary function calls.
>>
>> Your package is less than a year old. It's at version 0.1. We do not
>> normally accept packages into the stdlib until they are considered
>> mature and best of breed in the community. And then only if we feel a
>> need for its functionality in the stdlib.
>
> Hey Benjamin,
>
> You were probably looking at an old version - the latest official release is
> 1.0. But that is, of course, totally arbitrary :-)
>
> I think that building a community around this package would be fairly hard
> because it is fairly easy to replicate its functionality to solve particular
> problems.
>
> I don't think that should be a barrier for inclusion of new utility modules
> though. Consider urlparse, StringIO, etc. They are very useful but I doubt
> that they would have had much usage if they had been released as third-party
> modules - everyone would have simply coded the sub-set of the functionality
> that they needed to address the problem at hand.
>
> Cheers,
> Brian

I obviously tend to agree with Brian; I know I've personally had to
implement things like this plenty of times, it's relatively simple
once you do it once or twice. This is a nice bit of syntactic sugar on
top of the threading/multiprocessing modules.

jesse