Python Programming On Win32

Apartment Living

Each object lives in what COM terms a threading apartment, of which there are two types, free-threaded and single-threaded. A process can have zero or one free-threaded apartments and any number of single-threaded apartments (one for each thread with a single-threaded object).

The apartment is nothing more than a conceptual framework invented by COM to explain the rules and other nuances of using threading with COM. An apartment is a grouping of objects by their threading characteristics. Before a thread can use COM, it must indicate its threading model (that is, if a new single-threaded apartment should be created, or if this thread should live in the free-threaded apartment). The apartment an object lives in is determined either by the implementation of the object or the thread that created the object, as we discuss later.

The point of the COM-threading models is to allow simple objects that aren’t written with threads in mind to be used by another object that is thread-aware. If an object is written with the assumption that concurrent access to the object isn’t possible, then using such an object from multiple threads is likely to be disastrous. Therefore, threads that reside in the same apartment can make unrestricted use of all objects in that apartment, but whenever threads from different apartments (that is, two threads that are not both in the free-threaded apartment) need to use an object, COM steps in. COM uses what is known as a proxy to automatically ...