Summary of threading for experienced non-Python programmers?

[Donn Cave]

In article <654ng1F2cvh8aU1 at mid.uni-berlin.de>,
 "Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> wrote:

> > systems.  (In theory, file input/output should also be available as
> > asynchronous code, but async IO is low-level and not available in
> > Python.)  While threads shouldn't be considered a replacement for
> 
> I suggest you tell that the twisted-guys. And the ones from the built-in 
> asyncore-module.
> 
> They will be surprised to hear that their years worth of working code 
> will evaporate in a rosa cloud.
> 
> Diez

I appreciate the droll sense of humor, but do you mean to
assert that asyncore.py supports asynchronous disk file I/O?

What that means to me is, you queue a disk read, and there's
an event flag or something that you can wait for before you
come back to find the data in your buffer.  (That's how I
remember it from the old days, when it mattered a little,
though not enough that I ever remember actually doing it,
and 20 years later I guess the incentive is even less.)

I see MacOS supports an F_RDADVISE that might give you a head
start on reading into the system buffer, but that's 3rd rate
asynchrony because there's no way to know when the data is
ready, and 3rd rate I/O because afterwards you still have the
copying to do.  I don't see even this much in asyncore.py, but
I just gave it a glance.

thanks,
   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu