Kill GIL

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Dave Brueck <dave at pythonapocrypha.com>:
...
| Another related benefit is that a lot of application state is implicitly and 
| automatically managed by your local variables when the task is running in a 
| separate thread, whereas other approaches often end up forcing you to think in
| terms of a state machine when you don't really care* and as a by-product you 
| have to [semi-]manually track the state and state transitions - for some 
| problems this is fine, for others it's downright tedious.

I don't know if the current Stackless implementation has regained any
of this ground, but at least of historical interest here, the old one's
ability to interrupt, store and resume a computation could be used to

As you may know, it used to be, in Stackless Python, that you could have
both.  Your function would suspend itself, the select loop would resume it,
for something like serialized threads.  (The newer version of Stackless
lost this continuation feature, but for all I know there may be new
features that regain some of that ground.)

I put that together with real OS threads once, where the I/O loop was a
message queue instead of select.  A message queueing multi-threaded
architecture can end up just as much a state transition game.  

I like threads when they're used in this way, as application components
that manage some device-like thing like a socket or a graphic user interface
window, interacting through messages.  Even then, though, there tend to
be a lot of undefined behaviors in events like termination of the main
thread, receipt of signals, etc.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com