[Python-Dev] Pythonic concurrency

[Michael Sparks]

On Thursday 06 October 2005 23:15, Josiah Carlson wrote:
[... 6 specific use cases ...]
> If Kamaelia is able to handle all of the above mechanisms in both a
> blocking and non-blocking fashion, then I would guess it has the basic
> requirements for most concurrent applications.

It can. I can easily knock up examples for each if required :-)

That said, a more interesting example implemented this week (as part of
a rapid prototyping project to look at collaborative community radio)
implements an networked audio mixer matrix. That allows mutiple sources of
audio to be mixed, sent on to multiple destinations, may be duplicate mixes
of each other, but also may select different mixes. The same system also
includes point to point communications for network control of the mix.

That application covers ( I /think/ ) 1, 2, 3, 4,  and 6 on your list of
things as I understand what you mean. 5 is fairly trivial though. (The
largest bottleneck in writing it was my personal misunderstanding of
how to actually mix 16bit signed audio :-)

Regarding blocking & non-blocking, links can be marked to synchronous, which
forces blocking style behaviour. Since generally we're using generators, we
can't block for real which is why we throw an exception there. However,
threaded components can & do block. The reason for this was due to the
architecture being inspired by noting the similarities between asynchronous
hardware systems/langages and network systems.

> into my tuple space implementation before it is released. 

I'd be interested in hearing more about that BTW. One thing we've found is
that much organic systems have a neural system for communications between
things, (hence Axon :), that you also need to equivalent of a hormonal system.
In the unix shell world, IMO the environment acts as that for pipelines, and
similarly that's why we have an assistant system. (Which has key/value lookup
facilities)

It's a less obvious requirement, but is a useful one nonetheless, so I don't
really see a message passing style as excluding a linda approach - since
they're orthoganal approaches.

Best Regards,


Michael.
-- 
Michael Sparks, Senior R&D Engineer, Digital Media Group
Michael.Sparks at rd.bbc.co.uk, http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/
British Broadcasting Corporation, Research and Development
Kingswood Warren, Surrey KT20 6NP

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