Queue.Queue-like class without the busy-wait

[Paul Rubin]

Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> writes:
> Well have a look at what I have written over the weekend. It uses
> a seperate thread with one pipe for a wakeup mechanisme.

Thanks, I'll look at it.  Why don't you use usleep instead of a pipe?
I decided over the weekend that using a separate thread with usleep is
the simplest thing to do in pure Python.  If you want to use sigalarm,
that should be put in the low level C sigalarm handler so it gets
taken care separately from the Python interpreter does anything with
the signal.  Locks should also be low level primitives.

I don't know how this stuff maps onto PyPy but I sincerely hope the
looping stuff goes away.  Having a series of processing steps
connected by queues is a perfectly good way to organize a program, but
if there's even just 20 steps, then waiting for all those 50 msec
wakeups adds a whole second to the processing latency if the system
has been sleeping for a while.  The latency really only needs to be in
the microseconds on a system with efficient enough threading.