Will multithreading make python less popular?

[Tim Wintle]

On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 12:48 -0800, Falcolas wrote:
> That's fair, but by using a high level language in the first place,
> you've already made the conscious decision to sacrifice speed for ease
> of programming. Otherwise, you would probably be programming in C.
My parents would have gone mad at me for saying that when I was young -
C is just about the highest-level language they ever used - Assembly/hex
all the way!

So if you really want speed then why don't you write your code in
assembly? That's the only "perfect language" - it's capable of doing
everything in the most efficient way possible on your machine.

Of course that's a hassle, so I guess you may as well use C, since
that's almost certainly only linearly worse than using assembly, and it
takes far less time to use.

Oh, but then you may as well use python, since (again) that's probably
only linearly worse than C, and well-programmed C at that - I certainly
wouldn't end up with some of the optimisations that have gone into the
python interpreter!

That's basically what my mind goes through whenever I choose a language
to use for a task - and why I almost always end up with Python.

> It's a proposition that used to bother me, until I did some actual
> programming of real world problems in Python. I've yet to really find
> a case where the application was slow enough to justify the cost of
> using multiple Python processes.

I deal with those situations a fair bit - but the solutions are normally
easy - if it's limited by waiting for IO then I use threads, if it's
limited by waiting for CPU time then I use multiple processes, or share
the job over another application (such as MySQL), or run a task over a
cluster.

If you have a task where the linear optimisation offered by multiple
cores is really important then you can either:
 * Run it over multiple processes, or multiple machines in Python
or
 * spend a year writing it in C or assembly, by which time you can buy a
new machine that will run it fine in Python.


Yes, we're coming to a point where we're going to have tens of cores in
a chip, but by that time someone far cleverer than me (possibly someone
who's on this list) will have solved that problem. The top experts in
many fields use Python, and if they weren't able to make use of multiple
core chips, then there wouldn't be any demand for them.

Tim Wintle


> 
> ~G
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list