Windows editor?

Jeff Shannon jeff at ccvcorp.com
Thu Jun 7 21:02:27 EDT 2001


"Nick Perkins" <nperkins7 at home.com> wrote in message news:<uKBS6.127287$eK2.30206190 at news4.rdc1.on.home.com>...
> I have used Boa Constructor (just the editor), for general-purpose Python
> programming.  I find it to be more stable than PythonWin.  In PythonWin, I
> find that if my program crashes or hangs, it will often take the IDE down
> with it.  Same goes for IDLE.  In Boa, I can usually kill my program without
> killing the editor, too.  The rest of Boa (wxWindows gui design) is also
> pretty good, but needs some work.

This is probably a result of the fact that PythonWin, and IIRC IDLE, run your
Python code in the same thread that the IDE runs in.  This can cause problems
that, when your code is stuck on something, PythonWin can't service it's 
message queue.  Boa Constructor, from what I've heard, runs user code in a 
separate thread (or perhaps it was a separate process?), thus preventing this
sort of problem.  But from what Mark Hammond (creator of PythonWin and major
force behind Komodo) has said, running user code out-of-process is a lot 
more difficult, which is why there are no plans to do that for PythonWin 
(though Komodo *does* do this).  

Also, PythonWin doesn't tend to cooperate too well with multithreaded programs,
or with gui-package programs (ie, Tkinter/wxPython).  Other than those
caveats, though, PythonWin is great--I really like having the autocomplete!

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International



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