[Python-Dev] ActiveState & fork & Perl

[Greg Stein]

Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> 
> Skip Montanaro writes:
> >True enough, but as Guido pointed out, enabling threads by default would
> >immediately make the Mac a second-class citizen.  Test cases and demos would
> 
>     One possibility might be NSPR, the Netscape Portable Runtime,
> which provides platform-independent threads and I/O on Mac, Win32, and
> Unix.  Perhaps a thread implementation could be written that sat on
> top of NSPR, in addition to the existing pthreads implementation.
> See http://www.mozilla.org/docs/refList/refNSPR/.
> 
>     (You'd probably only use NSPR on the Mac, though; there seems no
> point in adding another layer of complexity to Unix and Windows.)

NSPR is licensed under the MPL, which is quite a bit more restrictive
than Python's license. Of course, you could separately point Mac users
to it to say "if you get NSPR, then you can have threads".

Apache ran into the licensing issue and punted NSPR in favor of a
home-grown runtime (which is not as ambitious as NSPR).

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/