Asynchronous method call in Python?

Question

I was wondering if there's any library for asynchronous method calls in Python. It would be great if you could do something like

@async
def longComputation():
    <code>


token = longComputation()
token.registerCallback(callback_function)
# alternative, polling
while not token.finished():
    doSomethingElse()
    if token.finished():
        result = token.result()

Or to call a non-async routine asynchronously

def longComputation()
    <code>

token = asynccall(longComputation())

It would be great to have a more refined strategy as native in the language core. Was this considered?

Answer 1

Something like:

import threading

thr = threading.Thread(target=foo, args=(), kwargs={})
thr.start() # Will run "foo"
....
thr.is_alive() # Will return whether foo is running currently
....
thr.join() # Will wait till "foo" is done

See the documentation at https://docs.python.org/library/threading.html for more details.