[Python-3000] improved threading in py3k (original) (raw)

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk qrczak at knm.org.pl
Fri Aug 4 23:42:07 CEST 2006

"tomer filiba" <tomerfiliba at gmail.com> writes:

once a thread is created, there is no way to kill it externally. which is a pity, since the thread must be "willing" to die,

Doing that unconditionally is impractical: the thread has no way to protect itself from being killed at moments it has invariants of shared data temporarily violated.

I agree that it should not require continuous checking for a thread-local "ask to terminate" flag spread into all potentially long-running loops, i.e. it requires a language mechanism. But it must be temporarily blockable and catchable.

Here is how I think the design should look like: http://www.cs.ioc.ee/tfp-icfp-gpce05/tfp-proc/06num.pdf

This is the same issue as with other asynchronous exceptions like ^C. What has happened to Freund's & Mitchell's "Safe Asynchronous Exceptions For Python" <http://www.cs.williams.edu/~freund/papers/02-lwl2.ps>? My design is an extension of that.

-- _("< Marcin Kowalczyk _/ qrczak at knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/

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