[Stackless] Question on Hard Switching and Soft Switching

[Andrew Francis]

Hi Kristján:

--- On Tue, 9/29/09, Kristján Valur Jónsson <kristjan at ccpgames.com> wrote:

> I've been exporing the bowels of Stackless a bit in the
> last weeks and am somewhat familiar with the topic.

Thanks a lot for the detailed description! 

As per Armin's suggestion, I will move this thread to the stackless
mailing list.
 
> I have not done any performance measurements to evaluate
> the merits of soft switching.  But I must confess that
> the presence of soft-switching makes stackless much more
> difficult to understand for me.  And a lot of the diff
> between trunk python and stackless python is because of the
> boilerplate code required to get soft switching to work.

Well I came across two slides in the "Stackless Python and PyPy Nults and
Bolts" talk.

It states that soft switching is 100 x faster than a thread. Hard switching is 10 x. I don't know if this fact is helpful.

> I hope this clears things up.

It helps. I need to learn a lot more to better use the information
you have given me.

Cheers,
Andrew