Welcome to Vanilla!

Overview

Vanilla allows you to build concurrent software in Python. Vanilla programs are structured around independent coroutines (greenlets) which communicate with each other via Pipes. Pipes are similar to channels in Go programming.

There’s no callback crazyness and no monkey patching. Vanilla strives to be as explict and straightforward as possible.

Documentation

Read the Docs

Here’s how it looks:

You spawn coroutines:

h = vanilla.Hub()

def beat(message):
    while True:
        print(message)
        h.sleep(1000)

h.spawn(beat, 'Tick')
h.spawn_later(500, beat, 'Tock')
# Tick / Tock / Tick / Tock

Coroutines communicate via Pipes:

h = vanilla.Hub()
sender, recver = h.pipe()
h.spawn(sender.send, 'Hello World')
recver.recv()
# 'Hello World'

Pipe-fu; inspired by reactive functional patterns, Pipes can be chained:

h = vanilla.Hub()
p = h.pipe().map(lambda x: x*2)
h.spawn(p.send, 4)
p.recv()
# 8

In Vanilla, everything is a Pipe. Here’s how TCP looks:

h = vanilla.Hub()

server = h.tcp.listen(port=9000)
# server is a Recver which dispenses new TCP connections

conn = server.recv()
# conn is a Pipe you can recv and send on

message = conn.recv()
conn.send("Echo: " + message)

Installation

Vanilla works with Python 2.6 - 2.9 and PyPy.

pip install vanilla

Status

Contents

• API Documentation
  • Hub
    • Concurrency
    • Message Passing
    • Pipe Conveniences
    • Thread
    • Process
    • TCP
    • HTTP
  • Message Passing Primitives
    • Pair
    • Sender
    • Recver
    • Pipe
    • Dealer
    • Router
    • Queue
    • Stream
    • State

Acknowledgements

The Twisted Project and the entire Twisted community for the strong grounding in Evented Async. Libor Michalek and Slide Inc for showing me using Python coroutines at phenomenal scale isn’t completely insane. Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng for Simplenote, Simperium, the chance to experiment with how apps will work with realtime APIs and for making it possible for me to live in San Francisco. Littleinc for giving me a chance to send a lot of messages and to open source this project which I started working on while there. Justin Rosenthal for believing in me, 30% of the time. Andres Buritica who did a lot of the early HTTP and UDP fragment (not pushed just yet!) work and Alison Kosinski, the coolest wife in the world.