[Python-Dev] ActiveState & fork & Perl

[Greg Stein]

David Ascher wrote:
>...
> I'm not denying that.  It's just that there are lots of things which fall
> into that category, like (to take a pointed example =), os.fork().  We
> don't have a --with-fork configure flag.  We expose to the Python
> programmer all of the underlying OS that is 'wrapped' as long as it's
> reasonably portable.  I think that most unices + win32 is a reasonable
> approximation of 'reasonably portable'.  And in fact, this change might
> motivate someone with Mac fervor to explore adding Python support of Mac
> threads.

Agreed. Python isn't a least-common-demoninator language. It tries to
make things easy for people. Why should we kill all platforms because of
a lack on one? Having threads by default will make a lot of things much
simpler (in terms of knowing the default platform). Can't tell you how
many times I curse to find that the default RedHat distribution (as of
5.x) did not use threads, even though they are well-supported on Linux.

And about stuff creeping into the distribution: gee... does that mean
that SocketServer doesn't work on the Mac? Threads *and* fork are not
available on Python/Mac, so all you would get is a single-threaded
server. icky. I can't see how adding threads to other platforms will
*hurt* the Macintosh platform... it can only help others.

About the only reason that I can see to *not* make them the default is
the slight speed loss. But that seems a bit bogus, as the interpreter
loop doesn't spend *that* much time mucking with the interp_lock to
allow thread switches. There have also been some real good suggestions
for making it take near-zero time until you actually create that second
thread.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/