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 tests/test_generator.py.

Greenlets are provided as a C extension module for the regular unmodified interpreter.

Greenlets are lightweight coroutines in-process concurrent programming. This package is the py.magic.greenlet module from the py lib_.

.. _py lib: http://codespeak.net/py/

Who is using Greenlet?

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/

Getting Greenlet

The easiest way to get Greenlet is to install it with pip or easy_install::

pip install greenlet easy_install greenlet

The development tip_ is available via these tools as well::

pip install greenlet==dev easy_install greenlet==dev

.. _tip: http://bitbucket.org/ambroff/greenlet/get/tip.zip#egg=greenlet-dev