[Baypiggies] Stackless anyone?

[Jon Rosebaugh]

On Apr 28, 2009, at 11:22 AM, Alec Flett wrote:

> I though the stacklesssocket stuff that Richard Tew was working on  
> was pretty interesting - did you play with that?

Yes, I did. It seemed to work at first, but we had some strange  
performance issues crop up when we started using Amazon web services,  
and it turns out that (at least back in October) stacklessocket does  
not support SSL.

> I've heard people complain before about the open-source stackless,  
> but it seems like such a slick solution to lots of problems that  
> Twisted solves well, but not always elegantly.. I'm curious what  
> real problems people have run into using Stackless for what it was  
> intended for (basically cooperative 'multithreading')
>
> I've always been interested in doing a Pylons implementation on top  
> of stackless where it uses stackless for threads (i.e. tasks)  
> instead of real threads - you'd get all the performance benefits of  
> Twisted, without the overhead of learning to use Deferreds.

The biggest complaint I have about tasklets is that there's no good  
way to send a message back to the other tasklet. Sure, there's  
channels, but in my experience they are awkward to use. I actually  
prefer Twisted's Deferred/callback architecture over tasklet/channel  
for this, though I think Erlang's message-handling is best of all.