The future of "frozen" types as the number of CPU cores increases

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

On Feb 22, 9:24 pm, John Nagle <na... at animats.com> wrote:
> sjdevn... at yahoo.com wrote:
> > On Feb 20, 9:58 pm, John Nagle <na... at animats.com> wrote:
> >> sjdevn... at yahoo.com wrote:
> >>> On Feb 18, 2:58 pm, John Nagle <na... at animats.com> wrote:
> >>>>     Multiple processes are not the answer.  That means loading multiple
> >>>> copies of the same code into different areas of memory.  The cache
> >>>> miss rate goes up accordingly.
> >>> A decent OS will use copy-on-write with forked processes, which should
> >>> carry through to the cache for the code.
> >>     That doesn't help much if you're using the subprocess module.  The
> >> C code of the interpreter is shared, but all the code generated from
> >> Python is not.
>
> > Of course.  Multithreading also fails miserably if the threads all try
> > to call exec() or the equivalent.
>
> > It works fine if you use os.fork().
>
>     Forking in multithreaded programs is iffy.

One more thing: the above statement ("forking in multithreaded
programs is iffy"), is absolutely true, but it's also completely
meaningless in modern multiprocessing programs--it's like saying
"gotos in structured programs are iffy".  That's true, but it also has
almost no bearing on decently constructed modern programs.