Advanced Python Programming

Converting blocking code into non-blocking code

While asyncio supports connecting to resources in an asynchronous way, it is required to use blocking calls in certain cases. This happens, for example, when third-party APIs exclusively expose blocking calls (for example, many database libraries), but also when executing long-running computations. In this subsection, we will learn how to deal with blocking APIs and make them compatible with asyncio.

An effective strategy for dealing with blocking code is to run it in a separate thread. Threads are implemented at the Operating System (OS) level and allow parallel execution of blocking code. For this purpose, Python provides the Executor interface designed to run tasks in a separate thread and ...