dual processor

[Michael Sparks]

Steve Jorgensen wrote:

> On 05 Sep 2005 10:29:48 GMT, Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> wrote:
> 
>>Jeremy Jones <zanesdad at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>>  One Python process will only saturate one CPU (at a time) because
>>>  of the GIL (global interpreter lock).
>>
>>I'm hoping python won't always be like this.
> 
> I don't get that.  Python was never designed to be a high performance
> language, so why add complexity to its implementation by giving it
> high-performance capabilities like SMP? 

It depends on personal perspective. If in a few years time we all have
machines with multiple cores (eg the CELL with effective 9 CPUs on a chip,
albeit 8 more specialised ones), would you prefer that your code *could*
utilise your hardware sensibly rather than not.

Or put another way - would you prefer to write your code mainly in a
language like python, or mainly in a language like C or Java? If python,
it's worth worrying about!

If it was python (or similar) you might "only" have to worry about
concurrency issues. If it's a language like C you might have to worry
about  memory management, typing AND concurrency (oh my!).
(Let alone C++'s TMP :-)

Regards,


Michael