Python reliability

[George Sakkis]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 23:00:04 +0300, Ville Voipio wrote:
>
> > I would need to make some high-reliability software
> > running on Linux in an embedded system. Performance
> > (or lack of it) is not an issue, reliability is.
>
> [snip]
>
> > The software should be running continously for
> > practically forever (at least a year without a reboot).
> > Is the Python interpreter (on Linux) stable and
> > leak-free enough to achieve this?
>
> If performance is really not such an issue, would it really matter if you
> periodically restarted Python? Starting Python takes a tiny amount of time:

You must have missed or misinterpreted the "The software should be
running continously for practically forever" part. The problem of
restarting python is not the 200 msec lost but putting at stake
reliability (e.g. for health monitoring devices, avionics, nuclear
reactor controllers, etc.) and robustness (e.g. a computation that
takes weeks of cpu time to complete is interrupted without the
possibility to restart from the point it stopped).

George