[Python-ideas] Making sys.std* thread-local

[Antony Lee]

The recent discussion about lexical vs. dynamic scoping reminded me of the
following issue, that plagues e.g. the new contextlib.redirect_stdout
context manager: the standard file-like objects sys.std* are global instead
of thread-local, making their manipulation unsafe in multithreaded programs
(this issue is related to lexical vs dynamic scoping because in a language
with (optional) dynamic scoping, these objects can be made dynamically
scoped, thus solving the issue).
Of course, changing sys.std* to being thread-local would be backwards
incompatible, but perhaps some new objects, e.g. sys.thread_local_std*,
could be added to sys, with print() and related functions using
sys.thread_local_std* if it is set and sys.std* otherwise.
Antony
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