[Baypiggies] November talk?

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On 10/26/07, Libor Michalek <libor at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 03:33:35PM -0700, Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> >
> > As much as I'd like to finally meet Aahz in person, I'd still really
> > like to see a breadth-first talk providing an overview of a bunch of
> > different topics such as:
> >
> > * Threads.
> > * Processes.
> > * Asynchronous IO.
> > * Stackless.
> > * Coroutines.
> > * Erlang's approach.
>
> JJ,
>
>    If you're still thinking of wanting multiple people, each presenting
> a portion, I'd be willing to volunteer to talk about coroutines, if you
> don't already have someone for that portion. It would be pretty heavily
> skewed towards the particular implementation we use for all of Slide's
> servers, Although, a November deadline might be a stretch, but I could
> be conviced. :)
>
> > Threads are cool, but they're a gigantic pain ;)
>
>   Indeed.

Now we're talkin'!  The approach that egroups, IronPort, and Slide
uses is really, really cool, and too few people know about it.

I really believe that I can pull a talk like that together.

* Start with describing a single threaded, single process Web server.
* Mention threads and multiple processes, per Apache.
* Mention select, kqueue, etc.
* Explain how Twisted wraps those things using callbacks.  Show callback style.
* Have Alex show how you can do simple coroutines with generators..
The PEP itself has some pretty good examples.
* Have Libor talk about how Slide does things with Stackless Python.

I'd love to give a nod to Erlang, but we might run out of time.  I
think we should mostly skip the code, and think about the big picture.
 I think high-level pseudo code would be a good approach.  These
topics can be confusing, and it's no fun to drown in the details when
you're trying to get the big picture.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I do have a good sense for the
structure of the whole talk, and I think it's doable.

Best Regards,
-jj

-- 
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