The Future of Python Threading

[Justin T.]

On Aug 10, 3:57 am, Steve Holden <st... at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> Justin T. wrote:
> > Hello,
>
> > While I don't pretend to be an authority on the subject, a few days of
> > research has lead me to believe that a discussion needs to be started
> > (or continued) on the state and direction of multi-threading python.
> [...]
> > What these seemingly unrelated thoughts come down to is a perfect
> > opportunity to become THE next generation language. It is already far
> > more advanced than almost every other language out there. By
> > integrating stackless into an architecture where tasklets can be
> > divided over several parallelizable threads, it will be able to
> > capitalize on performance gains that will have people using python
> > just for its performance, rather than that being the excuse not to use
> > it.
>
> Aah, the path to world domination. You know you don't *have* to use
> Python for *everything*.
>
True, but Python seems to be the *best* place to tackle this problem,
at least to me. It has a large pool of developers, a large standard
library, it's evolving, and it's a language I like :). Languages that
seamlessly support multi-threaded programming are coming, as are
extensions that make it easier on every existent platform. Python has
the opportunity to lead that change.

>
> Be my guest, if it's so simple.
>
I knew somebody was going to say that! I'm pretty busy, but I'll see
if I can find some time to look into it.

>
> I doubt that a thread on c.l.py is going to change much. It's the
> python-dev and py3k lists where you'll need to take up the cudgels,
> because I can almost guarantee nobody is going to take the GIL out of
> 2.6 or 2.7.
>

I was hoping to get a constructive conversation on what the structure
of a multi-threaded python would look like. It would appear that this
was not the place for that.

> Is it even possible
> to run threads of the same process at different priority levels on all
> platforms?
No, it's not, and even fewer allow the scheduler to change the
priority dynamically. Linux, however, is one that does.