I'll try the remotecall option (next week), hopefully the fetch from that
won't get things stuck.
I imagine there are a lot of *other* Python libraries that don't use libuv
and get Julia's coroutines stuck...

Thanks for all the attention!


Yakir Gagnon
The Queensland Brain Institute (Building #79)
The University of Queensland
Brisbane QLD 4072
Australia

cell +61 (0)424 393 332
work +61 (0)733 654 089

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 10:58 PM, Stefan Karpinski <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I'm working on fixing up the API to Amit's PR here
> <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/12503> that allows you to call a
> C function in another thread. That could also potentially be used for this.
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Mohammed El-Beltagy <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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]> 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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