Asynchronous method call in Python?

You can use the multiprocessing module added in Python 2.6. You can use pools of processes and then get results asynchronously with:

apply_async(func[, args[, kwds[, callback]]])

E.g.:

from multiprocessing import Pool

def f(x):
    return x*x

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pool = Pool(processes=1)              # Start a worker processes.
    result = pool.apply_async(f, [10], callback) # Evaluate "f(10)" asynchronously calling callback when finished.

This is only one alternative. This module provides lots of facilities to achieve what you want. Also it will be really easy to make a decorator from this.

Something like:

import threading

thr = threading.Thread(target=foo, args=(), kwargs={})
thr.start() # Will run "foo"
....
thr.is_alive() # Will return whether foo is running currently
....
thr.join() # Will wait till "foo" is done

See the documentation at https://docs.python.org/library/threading.html for more details.

As of Python 3.5, you can use enhanced generators for async functions.

import asyncio
import datetime

Enhanced generator syntax:

@asyncio.coroutine
def display_date(loop):
    end_time = loop.time() + 5.0
    while True:
        print(datetime.datetime.now())
        if (loop.time() + 1.0) >= end_time:
            break
        yield from asyncio.sleep(1)


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
# Blocking call which returns when the display_date() coroutine is done
loop.run_until_complete(display_date(loop))
loop.close()

New async/await syntax:

async def display_date(loop):
    end_time = loop.time() + 5.0
    while True:
        print(datetime.datetime.now())
        if (loop.time() + 1.0) >= end_time:
            break
        await asyncio.sleep(1)


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
# Blocking call which returns when the display_date() coroutine is done
loop.run_until_complete(display_date(loop))
loop.close()