Keep Track of Where Each Python Thread Was Started
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 77.2k
- Forks
- 36k
- PR merge metrics
- PR metrics pending
Description
Feature or enhancement
Proposal:
Debugging threads can be tricky. One thing that could sometimes help would be knowing where Thread.start() was called. We could achieve this by capturing the traceback of the call and attaching it to the thread. We probably wouldn't want to keep the actual traceback, due to how that would leak all the frames, etc. Instead, we'd probably want to use traceback.TracebackSummary or perhaps even something more lightweight. (FYI, there are other places where such a lightweight traceback snapshot would be useful.)
FWIW, the same sort of tracking might be helpful for coroutines (asyncio), though this is partly addressed by https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/124640.
Has this already been discussed elsewhere?
No response given
Links to previous discussion of this feature:
No response
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading the Thread.start() entry point and traceback.TracebackSummary to understand the proposed capture and storage boundaries. Define the design with the threading maintainers, then add coverage showing that a thread records where it was started without retaining live traceback frames.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100