[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla at molden.no> wrote:

> On 09.02.2012 19:42, Mike Meyer wrote:
>
>  If threading is the only acceptable concurrency mechanism, then Python
>> is the wrong language to use. But you're also not building scaleable
>> systems, which is most of where it really matters. If you're willing
>> to consider things other than threading - and you have to if you want
>> to build scaleable systems - then Python makes a good choice.
>>
>
> Yes or no... Python is used for parallel computing on the biggest
> supercomputers, monsters like Cray and IBM blue genes with tens of
> thousands of CPUs. But what really fails to scale is the Python module
> loader! For example it can take hours to "import numpy" for 30,000 Python
> processes on a blue gene. And yes, nobody would consider to use Java for
> such systems, even though Java does not have a GIL (well, theads do no
> matter that much on a cluster with distributed memory anyway). It is
> Python, C and Fortran that are popular. But that really disproves that
> Python sucks for big concurrency, except perhaps for the module loader.
>

I'm curious about the module loader problem. Did someone ever analyze the
cause and come up with a fix? Is it the import lock? Maybe it's something
for the bug tracker.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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