Python Programming On Win32

What Apartment Do I Live in?

The obvious question to arise from this is “How do I control the apartment for my threads or objects?” There is no simple answer.

Fortunately, the rules for threads are quite simple. Before a thread can use COM, it must call one of the CoInitialize() or CoInitializeEx() functions and when it’s done with COM, it must call CoUninitialize(); these functions are exposed to Python by the pythoncom module. CoInitialize() predates the COM threading models, so it initializes a new single-threaded apartment for the thread. CoInitializeEx() takes an additional parameter that allows you to specify the threading model; thus, you must use this function to have your thread in the free-threading apartment. The first single-threaded apartment created (that is, the first thread that calls either CoInitialize() or CoInitializeEx() with the COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED flag) is given special significance as we discuss later, and is known as the main single-threaded apartment.

To hide some of this complexity, Python calls CoInitializeEx() automatically as soon as the pythoncom module is imported, and this is significant for the following reasons:

• The threading apartment for the first Python thread that imports the pythoncom module is controlled by this automatic process. By default, this thread is initialized in a single-threaded apartment, but this can be controlled by adding a co_initflags attribute to the sys module before importing pythoncom (see the final sample in this ...