[Idle-dev] idle-fork, merging 2x SPE patches

[Guido van Rossum]

> Guido van Rossum writes:
>  > I wasn't thinking of XML-RPC to solve the security or performance
>  > problems (although with expat, xmlrpclib seems to perform well!).  I
>  > was thinking of using xmlrpclib rather than a home-grown RPC protocol.
> 
>   I'd still be suspicious, but I'm not familiar with either SPE patch,
> so perhaps I'm over-estimating the frequency of round trips.  If
> XML-RPC would be used to report things like call/return events to the
> IDLE process, I'd expect the overhead to be excessive.  If it's only
> to control breakpoints and the like, then it's probably fine, as the
> frequency should be relatively low.

The main performance problem is a program that writes a bunch of short
lines, like this:

    for i in range(100): print i

This generates 200 RPC calls (each line is composed of the object
followed by a separate newline) and is noticeably slower using my RPC
than with direct execution.

The debugger doesn't work well in remote mode yet (I think I never
finished that part), but it should only make an RPC call when it needs
something from the GUI, i.e. for breaks.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)