Get the basics of a process executor working

Since we support various executors (threaded and distributed)
the next best executor when a threaded executor will not perform
and a distributed one requires to much setup is a local process
based one so it would be great to support this where we can.

Things that are currently (likely never) not going to work:

 * Non-pickleable/non-copyable tasks
 * Tasks that return non-pickleable/non-copyable results
 * Tasks that use non-pickleable/non-copyable args/kwargs

Part of blueprint process-executor

Change-Id: I966ae01d390c7217b858db3feb2db949ce5c08d1

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/taskflow/utils/threading_utils.py b/taskflow/utils/threading_utils.py
index b3749bc..5048401 100644
--- a/taskflow/utils/threading_utils.py
+++ b/taskflow/utils/threading_utils.py
@@ -40,6 +40,13 @@ else:
     Event = threading.Event
 
 
+def is_alive(thread):
+    """Helper to determine if a thread is alive (handles none safely)."""
+    if not thread:
+        return False
+    return thread.is_alive()
+
+
 def get_ident():
     """Return the 'thread identifier' of the current thread."""
     return _thread.get_ident()