Hi!
Eve Online in Stackless Python
fmspy.org <http://fmspy.org> with stackless python
etc.
I don't know how python does it but PHP has a lot of global context, and
sharing this global context between threads, whatever they are (OS
threads, user-space threads, etc.) would be massively complex thing tp
manage either for the engine or for the user.
And something like GIL feels like a reasonable compromise to me.
GIL would mean dreams about multicore stuff are just dreams, but beyond
that even with GIL, what do you do if you checked for class_exists and
it didn't exist, and you're about to load it when other thread loads it
before? Etc., etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time thinking about
stuff like that in your code. The fact that GIL protects you from
C-level context changes doesn't mean it'd protect you from PHP-level
context changes, like some code using some data structure and other code
changing it (on C level it'd be ok - no memory corruption, etc. - but on
PHP level it might totally break your code).
It's not to say it can't be done, but I didn't see yet coherent proposal
for any threads implementation that had also good use cases.
I think PHP is the last from the major scripting languages on the market
without some kind of thread support.
(Cannot find a good comparsion, but Ruby, Python, Perl does some)
And "keeping up with Joneses" is not a good use case.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
s...@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: s...@zend.com
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