[ANNOUNCE] Garbage collection for Python

[Hrvoje Niksic]

wware at world.std.com (Will Ware) writes:

> Florian Weimer (fw at deneb.cygnus.argh.org) wrote:
> > Is it possible to extend your GC in a way which would permit the
> > execution of several bytecode interpreters in multiple threads?
> 
> It sounds like you might want to simply run several copies of the
> Python interpreter in separate processes, which isn't a GC issue.

Maybe he might want that, but that's not what he said.  Separate
processes will not provide the sharing semantics needed for a
multi-threaded program to work.

C programs can at least fake that by using shared memory or System V
message IPC, but that won't work in Python.

> If memory isn't really that big a deal, and you don't need thousands
> of threads running simultaneously, you can use the thread/threading
> modules, which use whatever threading is provided by your OS.

This is still different from being able to embed multiple Python
instances in threads.