.. This file is included into docs/history.rst
Greenlets are lightweight coroutines for in-process concurrent programming.
The "greenlet" package is a spin-off of Stackless_, a version of
CPython that supports micro-threads called "tasklets". Tasklets run
pseudo-concurrently (typically in a single or a few OS-level threads)
and are synchronized with data exchanges on "channels".
A "greenlet", on the other hand, is a still more primitive notion of
micro-thread with no implicit scheduling; coroutines, in other words.
This is useful when you want to control exactly when your code runs.
You can build custom scheduled micro-threads on top of greenlet;
however, it seems that greenlets are useful on their own as a way to
make advanced control flow structures. For example, we can recreate
generators; the difference with Python's own generators is that our
generators can call nested functions and the nested functions can
yield values too. (Additionally, you don't need a "yield" keyword. See
the example in test_generator.py <https://github.com/python-greenlet/greenlet/blob/adca19bf1f287b3395896a8f41f3f4fd1797fdc7/src/greenlet/tests/test_generator.py#L1>_).
Greenlets are provided as a C extension module for the regular unmodified interpreter.
.. _Stackless: http://www.stackless.com
There are several libraries that use Greenlet as a more flexible alternative to Python's built in coroutine support:
Concurrence_Eventlet_Gevent_.. _Concurrence: http://opensource.hyves.org/concurrence/ .. _Eventlet: http://eventlet.net/ .. _Gevent: http://www.gevent.org/
The easiest way to get Greenlet is to install it with pip::
pip install greenlet
Source code archives and binary distributions are available on the python package index at https://pypi.org/project/greenlet
The source code repository is hosted on github: https://github.com/python-greenlet/greenlet
Documentation is available on readthedocs.org: https://greenlet.readthedocs.io