On 25 May 2017 at 20:01, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com> wrote:
More significantly, I genuinely believe that isolated interpreters in the same process is a tool that many people will find extremely useful and will help the Python community. Consequently, exposing subinterpreters in the stdlib would result in a stronger incentive for folks to fix the known bugs and find a solution to the challenges for extension modules.
I'm definitely interested in subinterpreter support. I don't have a specific use case for it, but I see it as an enabling technology that could be used in creative ways (even given the current limitations involved in extension support). Perl has had subinterpreter support for many years - it's the implementation technique behind their fork primitive on Windows (on Unix, real fork is used) and allows many common patterns of use of fork to be ported to Windows. Python doesn't really have a need for this, as fork is not commonly used here (we use threads or multiprocessing where Perl would historically have used fork), but nevertheless it does provide prior art in this area. Paul