Em Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:56:43 +0530 Swapnil Talekar <swapnil.st@gmail.com> escreveu:

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We need to run multiple interpreters in-process. Which means we need to create completely independent environments for each interpreter using some very dirty hack. Since Python inherently does not support this. Python threads( created using python's threading module ) are not of much help because of the GIL. For this purpose the solution we have adopted is moving all the mutable python globals to heap.

What about using multiple processes? You could use pipes to exchange information between them.

As stated in the question, this is not possible for OSes like VxWorks (which is not rare on embedded platforms). Also there could be other constraints like the software architecture of the given system which make having the embedded interpreter in-process, more useful. Exchanging messages with separate interpreter process is slower. Also, the embedding process will have to create and expose a whole new interface which can be used by external processes. While if the interpreter is in-process, then its just a matter adding the services of embedding process as C-extensions to Python. One function call is all you need.