Hi Greg, digged this thing up while looking into the current async discussion. On 14.08.10 03:22, Greg Ewing wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Greg Ewing wrote:
In an application that requires thousands of small, cooperating processes,
Sure, and those use Stackless to solve the problem, which IMHO provides a much more Pythonic approach to these things.
At the expense of using a non-standard Python installation, though. I'm trying to design something that can be incorporated into standard Python and work without requiring any deep black magic. Guido has so far rejected any idea of merging Stackless into CPython.
Also I gather that Stackless works by copying pieces of C stack around, which is probably more lightweight than using an OS thread, but not as light as it could be.
So, here I need to correct a bit. What you are describing is the behavior of stackless 2.0, also what the greenlet does (and eventlet then too for now). The main thing that makes stackless 3.x so difficult _is_ that it is as efficient as can be, because no stack slicing is done, for 90 % of all code. Stackless uses operations to unwind the C stack in most cases. If this were possible in _all_ cases, then all the stack copying would go away, and we had no machine code at all! But the necessary change to Python would be quite heavy, undoable for a small team. I have left these ideas long time ago and did other projects. But maybe things should be considered again, after the world has changed so much. Maybe Python 4 could be decoupled from the C stack. cheers - Chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@stackless.com> Software Consulting : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 121 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14482 Potsdam : PGP key -> http://pgp.uni-mainz.de phone +49 173 24 18 776 fax +49 (30) 700143-0023 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/