[Python-Dev] Twisted Isn't Specific (was Re: Trial balloon: microthreads library in stdlib)

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:18:40 +1300, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> [snip]
>
>This is where my vision is fundamentally different:
>you shouldn't have to *make* a decision in the first
>place. All event-driven libraries should be made to
>use the same substrate on any given platform. Then
>they can coexist without the need for any top-level
>choices.
>
>I know that will be hard to do, but it's the only
>way out of this mess that I can see.
>

Thomas already pointed this out, but I'm repeating it
anyway.  This vision represents an impossible reality
at present.  You will not get Gtk or Qt or wxWidgets
to use Python's event notification API.  If you are
really very interested in solving this problem, go to
the developers of each platform those toolkits run on
and sell them on a unified event notification API. Once
they have adopted, implemented, and deployed it, you
can go to the Gtk, Qt, and wxWidgets teams and tell them
to port all of their code to that new API.  Then, you
can have a unified model in Python.

Until then, the practical compromise with almost zero
negative consequences (sometimes, one extra piece of
configuration will be required - compare this to how
the logging module works ;) is to optionally allow
explicit reactor selection.

Jean-Paul