[Python-ideas] In-process interpreters

[Chris Rebert]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Swapnil Talekar <swapnil.st at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am working on a project where we have a very peculiar requirements for an
> embedded interpreter. In my opinion these requirements cannot be extremely
> rare. I am posting this message to get some feedback from people who have
> worked on similar stuff or are interested in such a solution. If such a
> solution would be useful to a lot people if readily available as open
> source.
> We need to run multiple interpreters in-process. Which means we need to
> create completely independent environments for each interpreter using some
> very dirty hack. Since Python inherently does not support this. Python
> threads( created using python's threading module ) are not of much help
> because of the GIL.
> For this purpose the solution we have adopted is moving all the mutable
> python globals to heap.
> Nokia did a similar change to Python while porting it to S60 platform.
> Reference
> It seems Nokia has stopped using this solution but I am not aware of how are
> they going about now since I cannot think of any other solution to run
> multiple in-process interpreters. Jukka, can you throw some light ?
> Lua already supports this.
> I would expect other projects like mod_python would also have to face
> similar problem but I am not aware how they are handling it.

It used* "sub-interpreters" apparently:
http://modpython.org/live/current/doc-html/pyapi-interps.html
http://docs.python.org/c-api/init.html#Py_NewInterpreter

Cheers,
Chris

*mod_python stopped being actively developed in June, and was
apparently moribund since 2007.
--
http://blog.rebertia.com