Help me use my Dual Core CPU!

[Paul Rubin]

Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> writes:
> Nobody seems to have mentioned POSH http://poshmodule.sourceforge.net
> which used almost to work. I assume it's busted for later pythons and
> the author says it's just a demonstration.

Yeah, it's been mentioned.

> Anandtech demoed an 8 core mac pro machine and were unable to "max out
> the cpus".

You mean with POSH??!  And I see a 4 core machine on Apple's site but
not an 8 core.  

> Python needs some kind of multi cpu magic pretty quickly or we'll
> all end up using erlang :)

Heh, yeah ;).  

> As for subprocess I don't see it as much use unless we can at least
> determine the number of cpu's and also set the cpu affinity easy with
> occam maybe not in python.

I haven't looked at Occam.  I've been sort of interested in Alice
(concurrent ML dialect), though apparently the current version is
interpreted.  Erlang is of less somewhat interest to me because it's
dynamically typed like Python.  Not that dynamic typing is bad, but
I'm already familiar with Python (and previously Lisp) so I'd like to
try out one of the type-inferenced languages in order to get a feel
for the difference.  I'd also like to start using something with a
serious optimizing compiler (MLton, Ocaml) but right now none of these
support concurrency.

I guess I should check into GHC:

  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Concurrency