[pypy-dev] Stacklets

[Andrew Francis]

Hello Richard:



________________________________
From: Richard Tew <richard.m.tew at gmail.com>
To: Andrew Francis <andrewfr_ice at yahoo.com>
Cc: Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org>; "pypy-dev at python.org" <pypy-dev at python.org>
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: [pypy-dev] Stacklets

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 1:21 AM, Andrew Francis <andrewfr_ice at yahoo.com> wrote:
AF> Welll the easiest thing to do is to see if import _continuation fails. And
AF> if it does fail, try to import greenlets. Also keep the old greenlet code. This is very much the way 
AF>the previous stackless.py worked.

>Wouldn't that complicate the code unnecessarily?

It complicates the code a bit more. However Stackless Python's big problem is that people do 
not want to install another Python interpreter. Stackless.py with greenlets gives folks one less excuse
not to test drive Stackless.

>  Perhaps a better way would be to put the burden on the greenlet users and if they wish to
>share the implementation, they should write an emulation layer for continuations.

How can this be better? My own experiences: I greatly benefited from not having to worry about greenlets and being allowed to focus solely on select(). If users have to write their own emulation layer, I see major two things happening: 1) folks walk away. 2) One gets a proliferation of emulation layers - wasted manpower. As it stands the PyPy developers made the right choice.

As an example, look at the number of spinoffs from Stackless and stackless.py due to a lack of 
networking.

AF> The other branch would be experimental. Wilder stuff would be done there.

>Sounds like a good idea to me.  As long as any new or altered features
>do not make it into what is labelled as an implementation of the
>Stackless API without also being accepted into Stackless itself.

Richard, in the long run, people will use whatever solves their problems and creates opportunities. I don't know about you but I'm interested in using PyPy and stackless.py to prototype new concurrency constructs that I want to use.... and in the process, throwing the prototypes out there to see what sticks. 

Cheers,
Andrew
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/attachments/20110927/23bd615f/attachment.html>