In case you haven't heard about it, ActiveState has recently signed a
contract with Microsoft to do some work on Perl on win32.
One interesting aspect of this for Python is the specific work being
performed. From the FAQ on this joint effort, one gets, under "What is
the scope of the work that is being done?":
fork()
This implementation of fork() will clone the running interpreter
and create a new interpreter with its own thread, but running in the
same process space. The goal is to achieve functional equivalence to
fork() on UNIX systems without suffering the performance hit of the
process creation overhead on Win32 platforms.
Emulating fork() within a single process needs the ability to run
multiple interpreters concurrently in separate threads. Perl version
5.005 has experimental support for this in the form of the PERL_OBJECT
build option, but it has some shortcomings. PERL_OBJECT needs a C++
compiler, and currently only works on Windows. ActiveState will be
working to provide support for revamped support for the PERL_OBJECT
functionality that will run on every platform that Perl will build on,
and will no longer require C++ to work. This means that other operating
systems that lack fork() but have support for threads (such as VMS and
MacOS) will benefit from this aspect of the work.
Any guesses as to whether we could hijack this work if/when it is released
as Open Source?
--david
