Semaphore or what should I use?

[Pierre Barbier de Reuille]

Ville Vainio a écrit :
>>>>>>"Bastian" == Bastian Hammer <webmaster at haustierworld.de> writes:
> 
> 
>     Bastian> Now I have to make sure, that both threads are
>     Bastian> synchronal, 1 thread edits something and the other is
>     Bastian> blocked until the first thread is ready.
> 
>     Bastian> Isn´t it a good idea to do this with a semaphore?
> 
> Semaphore will do, but this is a classical use case for
> threading.Lock.
> 
> There should be lots of stuff regarding locks (or more googleably,
> "mutexes") on the net.
> 

I don't agree. Mutexes (or locks) are best suited for critical sections 
(ie. sections that cannot be run by many thread at the same time). The 
kind of synchonisation Bastian want is not really semaphore either but 
more event. This python "Event" object is described in the section 7.5.5 
of the documentation of Python 2.3. There is no example, but I think 
Event are quite strait forward : you creates it, then some thread block, 
waiting the event to occure while some other thread execute until it set 
the event, allowing the blocked thread to go on its own execution :)


Here a small working example :

***8<************8<***************8<**********
import threading, time

class MyThread(threading.Thread):
   def __init__(self):
     threading.Thread.__init__(self)
     self._event = threading.Event()
     self._exit = False
   def run(self):
     while 1:
       print "Waiting for an event to continue"
       self._event.wait()
       print "Ok, the thread is unblocked now :)"
       if self._exit:
         return
       self._event.clear()
   def unblock(self):
     self._event.set()
   def exit(self):
     self._exit = True
     self.unblock()

t = MyThread()
t.start()
time.sleep(1)
t.unblock()
time.sleep(1)
t.unblock()
time.sleep(1)
t.exit()
***8<************8<***************8<**********


Pierre