[quiq]

This is the approach I've taken, albeit at the "top level" of the program. Since I know I don't have to deal with Windows I much prefer simply piping to parallel instead of xargs, or calling make -j8, or similarly letting some shell wrapper handle it over dealing with the overhead inside of python, especially multiprocessing.

However, where I think having this stuff available inside of python is useful is that it's cross platform and consumable from "higher levels" of python. A library can do some mucky stuff internally to speed computation but still present a simple sync interface, all without external dependencies.