Python microthreads

Markus Stenberg mstenber at cc.Helsinki.FI
Tue Aug 3 11:54:30 EDT 1999


wware-nospam at world.std.com (Will Ware) writes:
> Dirk-Ulrich Heise (hei at adtranzsig.de) wrote:
> : Did you build it on top of Christian Tismers
> : Stackless Python, or is it a different kind of
> : modification to the VM?
> I haven't looked at Stackless Python, but it sounds like an unrelated
> thing. As I recall, Stackless Python uses the C stack for everything
> whereas normally Python has a piece of stack in each frame object.
> It can do this because the compiler is smart enough to figure out
> exactly how much stack will be needed for any function call. So
> frameobjects have a field called f_valuestack which maintains the
> arguments and local variables for that function.

No.. Stackless python does _not_ use C stack. Normal python does. AFAIK,
that's what the stackless stands for (purely frame objects and such).

> What I did was to keep the frameobject exactly as it is in normal
> Python, but invent a thread object with a stack for frameobjects,
> and a couple more stacks for stack pointers and program counters.
> Additionally, I modified the bytecode interpreter (eval_code2, in
> ceval.c) so that it runs for a specified number of opcodes and
> then stops, leaving the entire environment intact. This lets you
> rotate thru several threads, executing each for a few opcodes, so
> it looks like the threads are running simultaneously.

Sounds like something you could do with Stackless Python, or on top of,
fairly easily. 

-Markus

-- 

	"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at
	a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system."
		-- Linus Torvalds




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