threading support in python

[Steve Holden]

sjdevnull at yahoo.com wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
>>"sjdevnull at yahoo.com" <sjdevnull at yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>>>Having memory protection is superior to not having it--OS designers
>>>spent years implementing it, why would you toss out a fair chunk of it?
>>> Being explicit about what you're sharing is generally better than not.
>>
>>Part of the win of programming in Python instead of C is having the
>>language do memory management for you--no more null pointers
>>dereferences or malloc/free errors.  Using shared memory puts all that
>>squarely back in your lap.
> 
> 
> Huh?  Why couldn't you use garbage collection with objects allocated in
> shm?  The worst theoretical case is about the same programatically as
> having garbage collected objects in a multithreaded program.
> 
> Python doesn't actually support that as of yet, but it could.  In the
> interim, if the memory you're sharing is array-like then you can
> already take full advantage of multiprocess solutions in Python.
> 
Ah, right. So then we end up with processes that have to suspend because 
they can't collect garbage? "Could" covers a multitude of sins, and 
distributed garbage collection across shard memory is by no means a 
trivial problem.

regards
  Steve
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