At 08:49 PM 5/31/04 -0400, Bob Ippolito wrote:
On May 31, 2004, at 8:37 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 02:09 AM 6/1/04 +0200, Christian Tismer wrote:
Anyway, I don't really get the point. 95% of Stackless is doing soft-switched stackless calls. Behavior is completely controllable. We can easily avoid any special C stack operation, by setting a flag that disallows it (easy to implement) or by excluding the hard switching stuff, completely (not an option now, but easy, too).
If soft-switching is portable (i.e. pure C, no assembly), and is exposed as a library module (so that Jython et al can avoid supporting it), then perhaps a PEP for adding that functionality to mainstream Python would be meaningful.
Soft switching needs to be implemented in a few key places of the interpreter itself or else Stackless would surely have been maintained as an extension module.
I'm aware of this, which is why I said "exposed" as a library module, not "implemented" as one. :)
It is already pure C, no assembly or platform specific code. Supporting the interface from Jython or IronPython should be possible, though at worst case each tasklet might actually be a new thread so it might not be terribly efficient... though it would work.
Yes, I suppose in the simplest case one could implement switching primitives via a simple mutex: acquire it when resuming, release it when yielding. If the PEP described the semantics of tasklets in terms of threads, then a heavyweight implementation could be achieved. However, it seems to me that any Python implementation that supports generators should in principle be able to support co-operative multitasking anyway, so long as there is no C code in the call chain. Since microthreads are basically doable in pure Python 2.2 as long as you write *everything* as a generator and simulate your control stack, it seems you should be able to do this in the Python interpreter. Actually, it seems to me that if there were a way to resume execution of a frame that has thrown a special "task switching" exception (sort of a non-local 'yield' operation), you could implement lightweight threading *without* having to de-stackify Python. Of course, it's possible that the implementation of such a strategy might be just as complex as de-stacking Python. To make it work, I think you'd need a way to tell a nested execution of Python code that it's being called from Python code (as opposed to C), so that it knows where to "resume to". A chain of resumable frames could then be resumed by a special function. Then, upon catching an exception that didn't unwind via any C code, you can call a function to resume the interrupted frame (and its parents). Hm, actually, you'd have to copy the frames in order to be able to resume them, so you'd need to have a designated exception type for resumable exceptions, so as not to waste time copying frames for other kinds of errors. Okay, I think I just convinced myself that it would be better to just make the interpreter core stackless instead of trying to design all that other crud. :) (To clarify, that's not an unqualified +1 to some hypothetical stacklessizing. I'm just saying that if supporting ultra-light threading in Python is desirable, stacklessness seems at first glance like a promising way to do it, compared to trying to deal with unwinding the C stack. And, to top it off, I think you'll end up doing half of what Stackless already does in order to "resume" the interrupted frames anyhow.)