[pypy-dev] MinimalPython newbie questions

Armin Rigo arigo at tunes.org
Tue Jan 21 15:34:33 CET 2003


Hello Sébastien,

On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 11:33:12AM +0100, Sébastien Pierre wrote:
> Looking at the <www.tunes.org> site, which is maintained by Armin,

I'm not the maintained of that site, althought I often cite it.

> My question is: will MinimalPython try to incorporate the microthreads 
> from stackless and will try to incorporate ideas from tunes project 
> (like migration) ? If so MinimalPython would really be an ideal 
> language for developing agent-based applications.

Maybe.  There are quite a lot of exciting possibilities that we can dream of,
given enough flexibility.  Starting from a high-level description of the
interpreter (the interpreter written in Python), Stackless microthreads can
easily be added (or not).

Migration is a whole harder project, althought if we know what we precisely 
want it will probably be possible to add it then without rewriting everything 
(which is the whole point of the MiniPython project).

Migration is related to checkpoints, and saving and restoring program state.  
Scott pointed out numerous problems related to it.  I personally believe that
these problems araise from some kind of confusion between the various
abstraction levels; when you want a checkpoint, you cannot make a copy of the
state of the whole universe, so you must be clear about which abstraction
levels you want to save and restore.  For example, from the C point of view, a
program can only be checkpointed between two expressions; from the processor
point of view, it can be checkpointed between two instructions; but the level
that probably interests you is higher.  In a GUI application you may want that
the checkpoint occurs between two elementary user actions.  This is a whole
complex problem, outside the scope of MiniPy (which could however become later
a nice test bed).


A bientôt,

Armin.


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