# Result proxies UActor provide two different ways to return proxies to objects living inside the actor process: declarative and wrapping, supporting different use-cases: * Defining the method proxy via `uactor.Actor._method_to_typeid_` results in the specified proxy to be returned only when called from actor proxy, so calls from within the actor itself will still receive the actual result. * Using `uactor.proxy` helper explicitly specifies a proxy from the method, so you can to dynamically choose between different proxies and return values. These proxies will only be functional when received by the main process or other actors. ```python import uactor class Actor(uactor.Actor): _method_to_typeid_ = {'get_declarative_proxy_to_data': 'list'} def __init__(self): self.data = [1, 2, 3] def get_declarative_proxy_to_data(self): return self.data def get_serialized_proxy_to_data(self): return uactor.proxy(self.data, 'list') with Actor() as actor: proxy = actor.get_declarative_proxy_to_data() print(type(proxy), uactor.typeid(proxy), list(proxy)) # list [1, 2, 3] proxy = actor.get_serialized_proxy_to_data() print(type(proxy), uactor.typeid(proxy), list(proxy)) # list [1, 2, 3] ``` ## Serialized proxies The serialized proxy pattern is useful when you need to conditionally return different proxies or values. When `uactor.proxy` is called, a new proxy is created for the given value and typeid, which can be transferred safely to other processes. ```python import uactor class Actor(uactor.Actor): def __init__(self): self.data = [1, 2, 3] def get_data(self, as_proxy=False): return uactor.proxy(self.data, 'list') if as_proxy else self.data with Actor() as actor: value = actor.get_data() print(type(value), value) # [1, 2, 3] proxy = actor.get_data(as_proxy=True) print(type(proxy), list(proxy)) # [1, 2, 3] ``` ## Synchronization proxies uActor makes quite easy to share synchronization primitives between processes, by including specific proxies for this such as `Event`, `Lock`, `RLock`, `Semaphore`, `BoundedSemaphore`, `Condition` and `Barrier`, which can be used with primitives from `threading`, or even `multiprocessing` (albeit using proxies to `multiprocessing` should be avoided): ```python import threading import uactor class Actor(uactor.Actor): _exposed_ = ('event',) @property def event(self): return uactor.proxy(self._event, 'Event') def __init__(self): self._event = threading.Event() with Actor() as actor: print('Ready' if actor.event.wait(1) else 'Not ready') # Not ready actor.event.set() print('Ready' if actor.event.wait(1) else 'Not ready') # Ready ``` ## Asynchronous proxies uActor includes those extremely useful `Pool` and `AsyncResult` (for (for `multiprocessing.pool.Pool`) and `Queue` (for `queue.Queue`) proxies. This allow to parallelize work across multiple actors way easier than using raw primitives, just by sharing asynchronous result objects or queues. ```python import time import multiprocessing.pool import uactor class Actor(uactor.Actor): _exposed_ = ('pool',) @property def pool(self): return uactor.proxy(self._pool, 'Pool') def __init__(self): self._pool = multiprocessing.pool.ThreadPool() with Actor() as actor: start = time.time() async_result = actor.pool.apply_async(time.sleep, (2,)) print(f'{round(time.time() - start, 4)}s') # 0.0014s async_result.get() print(f'{round(time.time() - start, 4)}s') # 2.0032s ```