Coroutines

Coroutines are subroutines that offer non-pre-emptive multitasking through multiple entry points. The basic premise is that coroutines allow two functions to communicate with each other while running. Normally, this type of communication is reserved only for multitasking solutions, but coroutines offer a relatively simple way of achieving this at almost no added performance cost.

Since generators are lazy by default, the working of coroutines is fairly obvious. Until a result is consumed, the generator sleeps; but while consuming a result, the generator becomes active. The difference between regular generators and coroutines is that coroutines don't simply return values to the calling function but can receive values as well.

A basic example

In the previous paragraphs, we saw how regular generators can yield values. But that's not all that generators can do. They can actually receive values as well. The basic usage is fairly simple:

>>> def generator():
...     value = yield...