Python’s GIL explained through a multi-threaded application example — This article will look at Python’s Global Interpreter Lock — GIL. We will cover what it is, why it is there and what advantages/disadvantages it brings, and then cap off this article with a practical example. We compare a simple multi-threaded application in Python and C++ and show how the…

Understanding the ‘LEGB’ Rule — In Python, there are four different variable scopes: Local, Enclosing, Global, Built-in. This leads to the ‘LEGB’ rule, which defines how Python resolves / looks up names. In this post we will introduce all scopes with examples, and also show how one can ‘interact’ between these — e.g. …

About Data Hiding and Small Class Alternatives — In Python, a closure is a nested function, which accesses variables from its enclosing scope, and is returned by another function. This can be useful to avoid small classes containing only a single function, promotes data hiding and offers alternatives to global variables. In this article we’ll first introduce and…

Python Shorts — Part 7 — Logging is a powerful introspection tool, and a must for any professional software project. With it, we can keep track of our application’s execution, follow progress, find bugs and overall improve debugging. Luckily, Python offers a convenient standard library logging module, satisfying all those requirements. One good question to start…

Python Shorts — Part 6 — Developers often need some temporary files or folders, e.g. for unit tests, or just to store any kind of temporary information. For this purpose, they don’t care where these files are placed, how they are named, etc. One way of achieving this would be create some file / directory manually…

Using std::optional — Python developers, for example, are very used to “optional” arguments. By this I mean arguments which do not just have a default value (e.g. int arg = -1), but can be None, too — i.e. you really do not have to pass them, they can be “undefined”. Why you might…

Modifying Functions — In this post I’ll describe decorators in Python — a powerful tool to customise function behaviour, and a true enrichment for every programmer and program. Most tutorials on this start with a lengthy introduction into what functions in Python are (first class objects), and what we can do with them…

Python Shorts — Part 5 In this post we will have a look at context managers in Python. These are used via the with … statement, and work well e.g. for managing resources. In these use-cases, we want to acquire and make use of an resource, and eventually free it…

Python Shorts — Part 4 — In this post we will take a look at some advanced iteration tools in Python — in particular enumerate() and zip(). Enumerate Sometimes, you might want to iterate over an iterable, accessing all its elements — while simultaneously keeping track of the iteration number, e.g.: file_counter = 0 for file in files…