Advanced Python Programming

Queuing in concurrent programming

The concept of a queue is even more prevalent in the sub-field of concurrent programming, especially when we need to implement a fixed number of threads in our program to interact with a varying number of shared resources.

In the previous examples, we have learned to assign a specific task to a new thread. This means that the number of tasks that need to be processed will dictate the number of threads our program should spawn. (For example, in our Chapter10/example3.py file, we had five numbers as our input and we therefore created five threads—each took one input number and processed it.)

Sometimes it is undesirable to have as many threads as the tasks we have to process. Say we have a large number of tasks ...