Standard data structures

Some of Python's traditional data structure features provide various degrees of thread safety by default. However, in most cases, we will have to define some form of a locking mechanism for controlling access to these data structures in order to guarantee thread safety.

Sets

During my time working with communication between multiple threads in Python, I discovered that one excellent solution to using sets in a thread-safe manner is to actually extend the set class, and to implement my own locking mechanism around the actions that I wish to perform.

Extending the class

If you are used to working in Python then extending the class should be a somewhat simple operation. We define a LockedSet class object, which inherits from our traditional Python set class. Within the constructor for this class, we create a lock object, which we'll use in subsequent functions in order to allow for thread-safe interactions.

Below our constructor, we define the add, remove, and contains functions...