[ANNOUNCE] Garbage collection for Python

[Will Ware]

Boris Borcic (zorro at zipzap.ch) wrote:
> Just van Rossum wrote:
> > 
> > - Will Ware and I have worked hard on a complete rewrite of the
> >   uthread module. It is a *vast* improvement over the old one.
> >   It offers a very nice thread object and several handy threading
> >   widgets. It already can do stuff threading.py can only *dream*
> >   about, like pausing (blocking) a thread from another thread or
> >   posting an exception from another thread (!).

> Simple examples of useful new idioms that this permits ?

As far as programming idioms, you can get a sense of some of them
from the manual for the previous version of microthreads:
http://world.std.com/~wware/uthread.html

The examples in the manual run with almost no changes in the new
version. The timer has changed a bit, it now counts real milliseconds
rather than the fairly arbitrary context switches. There are also a
few new widgets that aren't in the manual yet.

As far as real applications, Just's MacPython IDE is the only real
one thusfar. I've been thinking about doing a Pacman game (one
microthread for each moving monster, and one for the Pacman) but I
haven't found the time yet. My original interest in microthreads was
to support simulations with large numbers of simultaneously interacting
agents (without having to write each agent's behavior in some ugly
form with explicit context switching).
-- 
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Resistance is futile. Capacitance is efficacious.
Will Ware	email:    wware @ world.std.com