python suitability for large critical run forever apps

[Oleg Broytmann]

Hi!

   I recommend you to look briefly into some projects, written in Python.
Zope (www.zope.org) is well-know web application server. It is
multithreaded server, that can run for months without any problem. Mailman
(www.list.org) is a mailing list manager. It is so good that Free Software
Foundation adopted it is their "official" list manager.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Bruce Edge wrote:
> I started using Python for come user CLI stuff. It has worked out so
> well that we're thinking about extending it's use in our project.
> I am not experienced enough to be able to answer some of the issues that
> came up. Does anyone have any thoughts on these:
>
>
> > > *data* size of each Python interpretter plus however much space
> > > each object takes versus C++'s minimal data resource requirements.
> >
> >     Any rough numbers (shared interpreter code, shared data, unshared data
> >     and object overhead?)
>
> Multi-threading, and mutual exclusion. Are these available, reliable,
> and debuggable?
>
> > > Is Python a "toy" language or is it industrial
> > > strength ? For instance, does it facilitate recovering from exceptions,
> > > and leaving objects in good states (the strong gurantee) ?  When you
> > > are low on memory, will the fact that more Python operations require
> > > dynamically allocated memory make implementations more brittle ? Is it
> > > even possible to write a line of Python where you don't have to
> > > worry about out-of-memory exceptions (the no-throw gurantee) ?
> > > IOW if I'm in a low memory situation, can I perform any operations
> > > to even fail gracefully ?
>
> > > Regarding large-scale apps again, is there anything written in Python
> > > which "runs forever" ? That is, it doesn't just die to clean up and
> > > reset itself ?

Oleg.
----
     Oleg Broytmann            http://phd.pp.ru/            phd at phd.pp.ru
           Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.