[Python-3000] python-safethread project status

[Marcin ‘Qrczak’ Kowalczyk]

Dnia 18-03-2008, Wt o godzinie 14:32 -0600, Adam Olsen pisze:

> The finalizer thread blocks until something's been deleted.

Ok. If this is the only use case, I feel quite safe not having this,
because my finalizers are implemented independently (and a finalizer
thread is created on demand, which is cheap there).

> I think deferred is a vastly better default.  To translate for
> everybody else, deferred in this context means "set a flag that I/O
> functions can check".  It means you'll only get a Cancelled exception
> at documented points.

Well, if ^C uses the same mechanism, which is the case in my language,
then this means that ^C can only interrupt I/O, or synchronization with
other threads, or sleep, but not a long pure computation.

The choice of the default blocking state depends on the programming
style. The more shared data is mutated, the more tempting is to default
to deferred interrupts. The more functional style is, the safer are
asynchronous interrupts. Also defaulting to asynchronous interrupts
needs various language functions and constructs to block interrupts
implicitly, so code does not have to deal with interrupts all the time.
I agree that defaulting to asynchronous interrupts is risky, and might
be too demanding from library authors.

In reality whether a particular interrupt is safe to be processed
could depend on the kind of interrupt (e.g. even if a locally handled
interrupt should be blocked to avoid corrupting a data structure,
an interrupt which exits the whole program would be safe since the data
structure is dead then anyway). I have not considered such design in a
programming language. Looks too complex for its benefits.

> In contrast, asynchronous may raise an exception at totally arbitrary
> points.  Maybe in the finally portion of a try/finally block,

No, because my language blocks interrupts automatically there :-)

They are also blocked e.g. when a mutex is locked, or when a module is
being imported.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/