Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote: > Jean-Paul Calderone wrote: [...] >>This has been discussed many many times in the context of many many >>languages and threading libraries. If you're really interested, do >>the investigation Steve suggested. You'll find plenty of material. >> > > > I've been digging around with Queue.Queue and have yet to come across > any solution to this problem. Queue.Queue just offers a pretty package > for passing around data, it doesn't solve the "polling" problem. I > wonder why malloc()'s can't be done in an atomic state (along with other > operations that should be atomic, maybe that's a question for OS guys, I > dunno). Using Queue.Queue still puts me in a horribly inflexible > "polling" scenario. Yea, I understand many of the reasons why we don't > have "threadicide", and why it was even removed from java. What I don't > understand is why we can't come up with something a bit better. Why > couldn't a thread relinquish control when its safe to do so? While the > interpreter is busy doing malloc()s a thread receives a control message, > the thread waits until it knows its no longer in an atomic state and > gives control to the message handler when it can. Its about setting up > a large system that is controllable without the painstaking process of > putting message polling loops all over the place. Main threads in a > python program can setup a signal handler, accept signals, and that > signal can happily go ahead and kill a python interpreter. Why can't > this concept be taken farther and introduced into threading? > I take this to mean you don't want to do the necessary research? ;-)
> There is no system that is completely interruptible, there will always > be a state in which it is not safe to interrupt, but many systems work > around this just fine with cautious programming. Has anyone considered > an event driven approach to sending control messages to threads? > The big problem (as you'll see when you ...) is providing facilities that are platform-independent. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
