[Python-Dev] Pythonic concurrency - cooperative MT

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hi,

> I've never heard
> someone complain that the GIL is in the way for these types of apps.

I've never said so either.
I was just saying that it can be useful to mix cooperative threading and
preemptive threading in the same app, i.e. have different domains of
cooperative threading which are preemptively scheduled by the OS. That
has nothing to do with the GIL, I think (but I don't know much in Python
internals).

For instance the mix between Twisted and GUI event loops is a very
common topic on the twisted mailing-list, because people have trouble
getting it right inside a single system thread. The Twisted people have
started advocating something called the ThreadedSelectReactor, which I
haven't looked at but whose name suggests that some operations are
performed in a helper system thread.

Regards

Antoine.