I guess a long time ago, threading support in operating systems wasn't very widespread, but these days all our supported platforms have it. Is it still useful for production purposes to configure --without-threads? Do people use this option for something else than curiosity of mind?
At work, I'm working on embedded systems (television set top boxes) with a Linux kernel with the GNU C library, and we do use threads! I'm not sure that Python runs on slower/smaller systems because they have other constrains like having very few memory, maybe no MMU and not using the glibc but µlibc for example. There is the "python-on-a-chip" project. It is written from scratch and is very different from CPython. I don't think that it uses threads. http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/ Victor