xfork 0.17

submitting cpu-bound tasks to processes and io-bound tasks to threads

Convert a classic sequential program into a parallel one.

Why?

It runs faster.

What if not?

Don’t use it.

How?

for image in images:
    create_thumbnail(image)       # original

for image in images:
    fork(create_thumbnail, image) # parallelized explicitly

for image in images:
    create_thumbnail(image)       # parallelized implicitly (read below)

What about return values?

result = fork(my_func, *args, **kwargs)

And what is this result?

A result proxy that behaves almost exactly as if it were the return value of my_func. That in turn means, as soon as you access the result and it is not ready yet, the main thread blocks.

Furthermore, result proxies are contagious, i.e. evaluation are delayed until they are really needed. Don’t panic; in case of an error, you will receive the same traceback that you would see in the sequential case.

Speaking of threads …

and processes? fork will take care of that for you.

You can assist fork by decorating your functions (not decorating defaults to cpu_bound):

@io_bound
def call_remote_webservice():
    # implementation

@cpu_bound
def fib(n):
    # naive implementation of Fibonacci numbers

@unsafe # don't fork; run sequentially
def weird_side_effects(*args, **kwargs):
    # implementation

Parallelize implicitly?

If you don’t like the fork calling syntax, you can convert certain functions into forks.

Use with caution.

@io_bound_fork
def create_thumbnail_by_webservice(image):
    # implementation

@cpu_bound_fork
def create_thumbnail_by_bare_processing_power(image):
    # implementation

# the following two lines spawn two forks
create_thumbnail_by_webservice(image1)
create_thumbnail_by_bare_processing_power(image2)

Conclusion

Good

• easy way back and forth (from sequential to parallel and vice versa)

• cascading possible (thread-safe)

• compatible with Python 2 and 3

Bad

• weird calling syntax (no syntax support)

• type(result) == FutureWrapper

• not working with lambdas due to PickleError

• needs fix:

  • contagious_result (caller has no control over result; might get deprecated)

  • still needs some mechanism to wait and to evaluate all contagious results (using ‘with’ or function call)

  • not working with coroutines (asyncio) yet