ANN: Stackless Python 0.2

[Toby J Sargeant]

On Mon, Jun 28, 1999 at 12:34:48AM -0400, Tim Peters wrote:
> Nope!  It's a beauty of the implementation already that each code object
> knows exactly how much "Python stack space" it needs, and (just) that much
> is allocated directly into the code object's runtime frame object.  IOW,
> there isn't "a Python stack" as such, so there's nothing to change here --
> the stack is implicit in the way frames link up to each other.

This might be completely irrelevant, but during the course of my masters, I
considered doing this kind of thing to java in order to allow asynchronous
threads to share stack frames (don't ask...). My supervisor complained bitterly
on the grounds that function invocations where orders of magnitude more
common than object creation, and hence associating memory
allocation/deallocation with every call was considered horrendously
inefficient.

It seems that this should affect Stackless Python equally as much. Does anyone
have anything to add on the subject? I would imagine that frames could be
allocated and managed in chunks to alleviate a lot of the memory management
load...

Toby.