I've got a thread that's polling a piece of hardware.
while not hardware_is_ready():
pass
process_data_from_hardware()
But there are other threads (and processes!) that might have things to do. If so, I don't want to burn up cpu checking the hardware every other instruction. It's been a while since I've dealt with threading, and when I did it wasn't Python, but I believe most threading libraries have a yield
function or something that allows a thread to tell the scheduler "Give the other threads a chance."
while not hardware_is_ready():
threading.yield() # This function doesn't exist.
process_data_from_hardware()
But I can't find any reference to something like this in the threading documentation. Python does have a yield
statement, but I'm pretty sure that's something else entirely (to do with generators).
What's the correct thing to do here?