Short of doing a reimplementation, you could possibly run your python code 
in another process via a remotecall (as described in the manual 
http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computing/). In that 
case you REPL would be responsive as the I/O is done in another process. 

On Monday, October 12, 2015 at 10:10:39 PM UTC+2, Yakir Gagnon wrote:
>
> I see, thanks for the great explanation! 
> So there's nothing I can do. Would Escher get around it? I guess I'd need 
> to implement that python code in Julia...
> On 12/10/2015 11:34 PM, "Steven G. Johnson" <[email protected] 
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Monday, October 12, 2015 at 1:59:59 AM UTC-4, Yakir Gagnon wrote: 
>>>
>>> One important piece of information is the integration time (similar to 
>>> the shutter speed in a camera): after I set the integration time the 
>>> spectrometer start sampling the spectra at that frequency. When I try to 
>>> retrieve the intensities it will spit them out only when one cycle ends. 
>>> This means that when I try to run the function that retrieves the 
>>> intensities it can take anything from 0 to integration-time seconds. 
>>>
>>> Here's the weird thing: 
>>> When I run my code the REPL becomes non-responsive for integration-time 
>>> seconds, so if I try to type some text, the letters get typed in only one 
>>> letter at an integration-time (note that CPU usage is less than 3%)... But, 
>>> if I replace the function that retrieves the intensities with some mock 
>>> function that `sleep`s for a random amount of time and returns a (equally 
>>> long) vector of random floats, the REPL jitter is gone..! 
>>>
>>
>> Julia I/O functions, and functions like sleep(t), use the libuv library 
>> for asynchronous cooperative multitasking.  That means that when one task 
>> is waiting on I/O, another task (e.g. the REPL) can wake up if there is 
>> something for it to do.
>>
>> However, Python I/O does not use libuv, so when the Python I/O task is 
>> waiting to finish reading something then it just blocks, and nothing else 
>> in Julia can run.
>>
>

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