After I've seen a co-worker to unpack tuples while using multiprocessing.Pool.map(), I realized that the module is missing a starmap() method like itertools has.

I took it as a opportunity to contribute some code and implemented both starmap() and starmap_async().

The patch including tests is attached, please let me know, what you think. Please don't call me names, it's my first patch for such a high profile project like Python. ;)

In all my excitement, I somehow presumed that the docstring automagically lands in the docs. Added doc entries to patch (I hope they aren't too crude, I'm not a native speaker).

Same as first patch otherwise.

+def starmapstar(args):
+    return list(itertools.starmap(args[0], args[1]))

Is your new function restricted to 2 arguments?

No, that's just a helper function like the `mapstar` directly above. args[1] is the iterable with tuples that get unpacked as arguments.

This looks like a reasonable request to me, and the patch looks generally ok as well.

One nit: the patch needs "versionadded" tags for the two new functions.

Thanks for the feedback Antoine!

I updated the patch to latest default tip and added the requested tags to the docs.

Looks good to me, except for another minor nit:
"""
the elements of the `iterable` are expected to be tuples
"""

AFAICT, you just require the elements of `ìterables` to be iterables, not necessarily tuples.

You're right. I've updated the docs accordingly, thanks!

New changeset b07b1e58582d by Antoine Pitrou in branch 'default':
Issue #12708: Add starmap() and starmap_async() methods (similar to itertools.starmap()) to multiprocessing.Pool.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/b07b1e58582d

Patch committed. Thanks for your contribution!