[Python-ideas] PEP draft - Composable futures for reactive programming

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>>> To cut through that you'd have to have
>>> some kind of stack-swapping coroutine implementation like gevent...
>>
>> Forgive the stupid question, but how is stack-swapping during blocking
>> calls materially different from threads?
>
> It's also known as "green threads". The gevent folks and the Stackless
> folks (and a few others) do this and claim it is vastly superior to OS
> threads.

Gotcha. I grew up on OS/2 where the threading was lean and mean, so I
just used it. I'd be mildly curious to know how different
implementations of threads compare, and how many of them actually
warrant a "lighter-weight thread" feature like this, but for something
that aims to be cross-platform, I can see the value in doing it.

ChrisA