[Stackless] An idea for making Stackless more naturally usable

[Andrew Dalke]

Richard:
> Andrew's suggestion was to have something like this:
>
>   import stackless
>   stackless.monkeypatch()
>
> Where this would hook-in and override all the necessary things.

Max Noel:
> I think it'd be worth a try. The great unknown here, is how the
> standard library will behave once this change is implemented.

My hope would be to minimize those differences.  Some are rather
hard to fix though, like waitpid.  Spawn off a system thread for
each one?  Or emulate by adding a NOBLOCK along with some sort
of sleep(0.1) or so?

BTW, does Stackless work well with OS threads?  What caveats
are there?  The readme (in Stackless/readme.txt, dated
  "A small update as of 2006-03-01" says "supporting both
cooperative switching and stack switching, with the addition
of partially complete support for real OS threads as a tasklet."
but that's all I could find.


One thought I had is to monkey-patch plus use a threading.local
so

_config = threading.local()

def register_thread_for_stackless():
   _config.using_stackless = True
   _config.emulation_timeout = 0.1

def socket(*args):
   if getattr(_config, "using_stackless"):
     return stacklesssocket.socket(*args)
   else:
     return stdsocket.socket(*args)

Thus an OS thread can run with near-native performance and
with no chance of emulation errors.

Max:
>  Still, it's worth a try. It could also be interesting to provide an
>  asynchronous reimplementation of parts of the stdlib (an AsyncFile
>  class, perhaps?) as a proof of concept, to study some of the
>  possible side effects.

Try out stacklesssocket (from svn) - it's good enough
to support urllib ... though there is a bug when an exception
occurs which I haven't tracked down yet.  Don't have a reproducible.

According to the notes in asyncore

# Asynchronous File I/O:
#
# After a little research (reading man pages on various unixen, and
# digging through the linux kernel), I've determined that select()
# isn't meant for doing asynchronous file i/o.
# Heartening, though - reading linux/mm/filemap.c shows that linux
# supports asynchronous read-ahead.  So _MOST_ of the time, the data
# will be sitting in memory for us already when we go to read it.
#
# What other OS's (besides NT) support async file i/o?  [VMS?]
#
# Regardless, this is useful for pipes, and stdin/stdout...

which makes me happy because one of the things I want to stackless-ify
is subprocess, which uses pipes and hence should work with asyncore.


Otherwise I think the only solution is an OS thread.  Hmmm, or replace
open(filename) with
   some_async_dispatcher(os.popen("cat " + filename))


					Andrew
					dalke at dalkescientific.com


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