[Python-ideas] Thread exceptions and interruption

[Guido van Rossum]

On 9/19/07, Adam Olsen <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you're talking about unhandled exceptions, no, that's absolutely a
> > non-issue. The real issues are race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks
> > etc.
>
> I guess the bottom line here is that, since none of the proposed
> solutions magically eliminate race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks,
> etc, we'll need to try them in the field for quite some time before
> it's clear if the ways they do make things better have any significant
> effects in reducing the core problems.
>
> In other words, I (and the other pundits) should implement our ideas
> in a forked python, and not propose merging back until we've got a
> large user base with a proven track record.  Even if that's not as
> much fun. ;)

Agreed. Though race conditions become less of a problem if you don't
have fine-grained memory sharing (where you always hope you can get
away without a lock -- just Google for "double-checked locking" :-).
And deadlocks can be fought quite effectively by a runtime layer that
detects them, plus strategies for forcing lock acquisition order.

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