Comments appreciated on Erlang inspired Process class.

[Brian L. Troutwine]

> http://wiki.python.org/moin/ParallelProcessing

Ah, I'd forgotten about that page of the wiki; I hadn't seen it for a few 
months.

> Do you have any opinions about those projects listed on the above page
> that are similar to your own? My contribution (pprocess), along with
> others (processing, pp...), can offer similar facilities, but the
> styles of interfacing with spawned processes may be somewhat
> different.

The interface was my most important design goal, in that I wanted it to be a 
dead simple "Drop in some code and forget about it for a while. Retrieve the 
results later as if you'd called the function yourself." sort of thing. 
Secondly I wanted share nothing parallelism in order to avoid the nastier 
bits of implementing concurrent code.

delegate doesn't fit the bill because it returns its results in a dictionary. 
pp is rather more feature-full and rather less simple as a result. processing 
is a clone of threading, more or less, and voids itself for not being simple 
and having shared objects between processes (a nifty trick to be sure). POSH 
uses a shared memory approach and hasn't been updated, it would seem, since 
2003. pprocess isn't as simple as I wanted, though rather more simple than 
all the others. remoteD uses shared memory.

I suppose, then, my opinion is that they're not brain-dead simple enough to 
fulfill my desired style of process creation. (I'm smitten with Erlang.)

On Friday 01 June 2007 10:48:10 Paul Boddie wrote:
> On 1 Jun, 19:34, "Brian L. Troutwine" <goofyheadedp... at gmail.com>
>
> wrote:
> > Lately I've been tinkering around with Erlang and have begun to sorely
> > want some of its features in Python, mostly the ease at which new
> > processes can be forked off for computation. To that end I've coded up a
> > class I call, boringly enough, Process. It takes a function, its args and
> > keywords and runs the function in another process using os.fork.
> > Processes can be treated as callables to retrieve the return value of the
> > passed in function.
>
> This sounds familiar...
>
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/ParallelProcessing
>
> Do you have any opinions about those projects listed on the above page
> that are similar to your own? My contribution (pprocess), along with
> others (processing, pp...), can offer similar facilities, but the
> styles of interfacing with spawned processes may be somewhat
> different.
>
> Paul