Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
Sturla, expressing out and out contempt for entire communities of capable, competent developers (both the creators of Windows and Java, and the users of those platforms) has no place on the core Python mailing lists. Please refrain from casually insulting entire groups of people merely because you don't approve of their technical choices.
I am not sure what you mean. Using threads on Windows and Java comes from a necessity, not because developers are incompetent. Windows does not provide a fork and processes are heavy-weight, hence multi-threading is the obvious choice.
Avoiding object serialisation is indeed the main objective.
Good.
With subinterpreters, we have a lot more options for that than we do with any form of IPC, including shared references to immutable objects, and the PEP 3118 buffer API.
Perhaps. One could do this with shared memory as well, but a complicating factor is that the base address must be the same (or corrected for). But one could probably do low-level magic with memory mapping to work around this. Particularly on 64-bit it is not really difficult to make sure a page is mapped to the same address in two processes. It is certainly easier to achieve within a process. But if the plan for Erlang-style "share nothing" threads is to pickle and memcpy objects, there is little or nothing to gain over using multiprocessing. Sturla