[sapug] Introduction

[Daryl Tester]

Chris Foote wrote:

> I would be nice to have lambda's that spanned multiple lines though :-(

Backslash?  :-)  I think you mean multiple statements/expressions,
and yes it would.  The variable scoping issue for lambdas used to
suck as well, but I thought I read recently where that had been
resolved.

> What advantages does stackless Python have ?

Lack of stack.  All those needlessly wasted instructions pushing and
popping, and ultimately getting nowhere ...

In all seriousness, continuation like behaviour.  (Skip this bit
if you're continuation savvy, which I ain't).  It puts the stack
(in reality, stack frames) on the heap to be gc'd like any other
data structure.  This allows for "tasklets" which are similar to
non-preemptive threads, except you can have a very large number
of them.  The Eve Online game uses Stackless at the backend (I
think they're the biggest user of Stackless), and according to
the graph on their website they're breaking the 20K simultaneous
users online mark regularly.  I used to have some links to the
technology used for the game, but most of them appear to have
suffered bit rot (for instance, the upgrade issues that weren't
because they could pickle their continuations, update the code
then unpickle and continue).

> The more you know the more you don't know :-)

Oh, I know, I know. (done in a Sybil Fawlty voice while dragging
on a cigarette).

-- 
Regards,
  Daryl Tester, IOCANE Pty. Ltd.