Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Eric Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
No offense taken. The V8 experience makes me feel much more optimistic
that they might actually pull this off. (I'm still skeptical about
support for extension modules, withougt which CPython is pretty lame.)
The need to modify all extension modules is the usual non-starter I see
mentioned when this topic comes up. The OP really needs to think about that
issue.
It's a non-starter for immediate world-domination. But if they get the
core to be significantly faster I expect there will be motivation to
port extensions. There's also the PyPy effort to replace extension
modules with ctypes-based wrappers. I could also imagine that
extensions could be run in a sandbox that *does* use the equivalent of
the GIL.
For IronClad [1], an implementation of the Python C API in C# to allow
you to use Python C extensions from IronPython, we take a hybrid
approach to garbage collection.
We hold a strong reference to objects created by extensions (preventing
.NET from garbage collecting them) and allow the extension to manipulate
the reference count in the usual way. Periodically we scan our "managed
objects" [2] to see if there are objects whose reference count has
dropped to zero and we then delete our strong reference - allowing
garbage collection to happen normally.
We have also implemented a GIL for the C extensions even though
IronPython has no GIL.
Simple extension modules can already be used with IronPython through
Ironclad, and for Numpy (our goal) arrays can be created and used and we
are working on 'everything else'.
Moving more C extensions to an implementation based on ctypes would be
enormously useful for PyPy, IronPython and Jython, but ctypes is not yet
as portable as Python itself which could be an issue (although one worth
resolving).
Michael Foord
[1] http://code.google.com/p/ironclad
[2] Strictly speaking they are managed objects of unmanaged types, but
we really need a better way of talking about them.
--
http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/
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