Hi Folks:
I have just come back from EuroPython. One of the highlights of the conference
was that Christian Tismer was given an achievement award. Congratulations
Christian!!!!
I gave the talk "Prototyping Go's Select in stackless.py for Stackless Python."
I thank everyone that attended the talk. I was also going to give a lighting
talk called "Silly Stackless Python Trick" where I was going to demonstrate
pickling but the laptop I used wouldn't cooperate. My netbook did not have a
standard vga output.
Some thoughts. Most of the talks that involved concurrency, especially pyCSP
were well attended. Denis Bilenko gave a great talk on gEvent. I spoke quite a
bit with Denis. In his keynote, Guido von Rossom spoke about he attending
nearly all the talks involving CSP and how sub-generators are on his wishlist.
>From talking to folks, Stackless Python is not well understood. For instance I
>had a talk with Ray Hettinger after his generator talk (Monocle). There were
>quite a few things I believe he did understand about Stackless. Also the
>presence of other concurrency frameworks that use greenlets confuses where
>Stackless sits in the grand scheme of things.
I participated in two sprints: PyPy and PyCSP. Since my Netbook's Python
environment was worky, I couldn't get mercurial to work properly - so I could
contribute little. However on the PyPy side, Antonio was good enough to take me
by the hand and show me the initial baby steps for adding new syntax to Python.
Yeah!
As for my own talk. Well select and stackless.py are somewhat esoteric topics.
However select/alt appeared in two other talks!!! Still I felt I got deeper
into how the basics of CSP that used channels actually worked than most other
talks. Also the talk did cover a bit, both prototyping select with stackless.py
and its C implementation. Without my friend Kevin's help, it would have taken
me much longer to do the C part. Although the code passes simple tests, I have
written tests where the C version core dumps and the PyPy version hangs. This
suggests that there maybe a problem in the underlying algorithms.
That said, I talked to the PyPy team about my version of Stackless.py - where
it would reside. Similarly I would like to reach a consensus about Stackless C
select - how will it be handled? Where do the patches go? I am not an expert on
versioning.
Immediate plans. I will continue to test and debug select and try to improve
its API - I got a few ideas from PyCSP. I want the only difference between the
C and Python version to be performance. I will concentrate on this when I get
back to Canada. I will also write additional use cases. Overall I want to
understand how to make the prototyping process smoother....
I am also starting to look at something called Join patterns. At the simplest,
thread.join() is a simple join pattern. Join patterns can get much more
complicated....
That is all for now.
Cheers,
Andrew
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