[Python-Dev] Stackless Python

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Although I don't particularly agree with that, because Stackless 
> functionality could be turned on and off with a platform dependent 
> configure flag (like threads or unicode)...  Is there a canonical list 
> of CPU architectures and platforms that Python officially supports?

No - although there is a list of platforms, that Python *doesn't*
support (PEP 11). Python is written in C, so it should work on any
system that supports ISO C, although many functions won't be available
if the system doesn't support POSIX.

As for turning of things: yes, unicode can be turned off, but not
because the platform doesn't support it - rather because the
administrator doesn't like unicode. Threads are turned off on operating
systems that don't provide threads, and there is nothing that Python
could do about it.

Stackless' support for platforms is different: it includes assembler
code, so you have to write bits of assembler code for each architecure
(and perhaps for each system on a single architecture, or even each
assembler on each system).

[In addition, the approach taken by Stackless 3.0 is probably
questionable: for example, it may be that C++ exception handling
stops working in Stackless.]

Regards,
Martin