[Chicago] Stackless

[Atul Varma]

On 6/5/07, Chris McAvoy <chris.mcavoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> This Stackless tutorial has a blurb about "concurrency is the new
> thing" http://members.verizon.net/olsongt/stackless/why_stackless.html#concurrency-might-just-might-be-the-next-big-programming-paradigm
> which I agree with...however...if you make a bunch of microthreads in
> Stackless...they're not going to take advantage of multiple cores or
> cpu's, right?  Or am I wrong about that?

I believe you are correct.  From what I understand, a lot of people
consider the idea of a single address space being shared by two
processors (or threads) as a recipe for disaster, as code readability
is complicated by all the locking mechanisms and a whole new class of
extremely hard-to-debug problems crop up as a result (deadlocks,
starvation, race conditions, etc).

This post by Guido may help shed more light on it:

  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-May/007414.html

The bottom line, though, is that it appears as though Python isn't
really going to improve its support for threads; rather, the
assumption is that if a Python solution needs to take advantage of
multiple processors, it should use multiple processes instead of
multiple threads.

- Atul