[ANNOUNCE] Garbage collection for Python

[Will Ware]

Hrvoje Niksic (hniksic at iskon.hr) wrote:
> This is still different from being able to embed multiple Python
> instances in threads.

Are we talking about multiple Python instances running in a single
thread? That sounds like a very big challenge. The Python VM
would need to be rewritten to be reentrant so that multiple VMs
could simultaneously coexist, with distinct copies of the entire
computing environment (globals, locals, which modules had been
imported, etc). Then you'd need to arrange context switches; this
might be borrowed from the context switcher in Chris Tismer's
Stackless Python.

Making the PyVM reentrant would be a ridiculously large amount of
work, for which no other demand exists, as far as I'm aware. Maybe
the most helpful thing to do would be to point him to some other
language that already has a reentrant VM. Does Lua or Pike fit this
description?
-- 
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Resistance is futile. Capacitance is efficacious.
Will Ware	email:    wware @ world.std.com