[Python-Dev] Point of building without threads?

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

On Mon, 2012-05-07 at 21:49 +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> 
> I guess a long time ago, threading support in operating systems wasn't
> very widespread, but these days all our supported platforms have it.
> Is it still useful for production purposes to configure
> --without-threads? Do people use this option for something else than
> curiosity of mind? 

I hope that the intent behind asking this question was more of being
curious, rather then considering dropping --without-threads:
unfortunately, multithreading was, still is and probably will remain
troublesome on many supercomputing platforms.

Often, once a new supercomputer is launched, as a developer you get a
half-baked C/C++ compiler with threading support broken to the point
when it's much easier to not use it altogether [*] rather than trying to
work around the compiler quirks.

Of course, the situation improves over the lifetime of each particular
computer, but usually, when everything is halfway working, the computer
itself becomes obsolete, so there is not much point in using it anymore.

Moreover, these days there is a clear trend towards OpenMP, so it has
become even harder to pressure the manufacturers to fix threads, because
they have 101 argument why you should port your code to OpenMP instead.

HTH.

[*]: Another usual candidates for being broken beyond repair are the
linker, especially when it comes to shared libraries, and support for
advanced C++ language features, such as templates...

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev