Question

Python’s futures package allows us to enjoy ThreadPoolExecutor and ProcessPoolExecutor for doing tasks in parallel.

However, for debugging it is sometimes useful to temporarily replace the true parallelism with a dummy one, which carries out the tasks in a serial way in the main thread, without spawning any threads or processes.

Is there anywhere an implementation of a DummyExecutor?

Answer 1

Something like this should do it:

from concurrent.futures import Future, Executor
from threading import Lock


class DummyExecutor(Executor):

    def __init__(self):
        self._shutdown = False
        self._shutdownLock = Lock()

    def submit(self, fn, *args, **kwargs):
        with self._shutdownLock:
            if self._shutdown:
                raise RuntimeError('cannot schedule new futures after shutdown')

            f = Future()
            try:
                result = fn(*args, **kwargs)
            except BaseException as e:
                f.set_exception(e)
            else:
                f.set_result(result)

            return f

    def shutdown(self, wait=True):
        with self._shutdownLock:
            self._shutdown = True


if __name__ == '__main__':

    def fnc(err):
        if err:
            raise Exception("test")
        else:
            return "ok"

    ex = DummyExecutor()
    print(ex.submit(fnc, True))
    print(ex.submit(fnc, False))
    ex.shutdown()
    ex.submit(fnc, True) # raises exception

locking is probably not needed in this case, but can’t hurt to have it.