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[ANNOUNCE] Garbage collection for Python

Will Ware wware at world.std.com
Tue Apr 11 07:19:30 EDT 2000 
Florian Weimer (fw at deneb.cygnus.argh.org) wrote:
> Is it possible to extend your GC in a way which would permit the
> execution of several bytecode interpreters in multiple threads?

It sounds like you might want to simply run several copies of the
Python interpreter in separate processes, which isn't a GC issue.
Unix will be perfectly happy to do that, and WinNT should be OK.
Win95 and Win98 don't use "real" multitasking but it should be
possible to run at least a few simultaneous instances.

But the fact that you regard this as a GC issue might mean that you
are actually looking for very lightweight threads. Christian Tismer
and I have developed something that might be what you need, called
microthreads, which you can read about at:
http://world.std.com/~wware/uthread.html

If memory isn't really that big a deal, and you don't need thousands
of threads running simultaneously, you can use the thread/threading
modules, which use whatever threading is provided by your OS. These
modules have been around a long time and are much more thoroughly
debugged than microthreads.
-- 
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Resistance is futile. Capacitance is efficacious.
Will Ware	email:    wware @ world.std.com
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