[Twisted-web] Is there a way to implement a deferred sequence?

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Fri Apr 10 04:43:39 EDT 2009


On 08:12 am, twisted-web at udmvt.ru wrote:
>But what about deferring some more complex process, that may have zero 
>to more
>itermediate results before finishing? What if we are inside that 
>process and have
>some event, but we are not finished the process? Why can't the 
>consumers of the
>Deferred be interested in receiving that event too?
>Why not augment the Deferred for that?

Because Deferreds are intended to be an asynchronous mechanism for 
control flow.  They are the way to return a value which is not yet 
present.  In other words they are an asynchronous version of exit 
semantics; "return" and "raise".

They are very explicitly *not* designed to simultaneously implement 
asynchronous versions of every other potential control flow - looping, 
for example, which seems to be what you want.

There are other mechanisms for doing those things.  For example, if you 
want to get a stream of data and handle it incrementally, you want to 
implement an IProtocol or ITransport.  Trying to cram all of IProtocol 
into Deferred is a mistake.

If you want some abstraction to support an incremental stream of results 
with a size known in advance, for example to support drawing a progress 
bar on an upload or download, then please feel free to propose that as a 
*separate* mechanism from Deferred, and we can debate its merits and 
usefulness on its own.  But I doubt very much that Deferred should do 
such a thing itself.



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