[Python-Dev] Threading, NPTL, CPU affinity, Linux 2.6, etc. (original) (raw)

Jeff Epler jepler at unpythonic.net
Tue Mar 23 22:21:37 EST 2004

I think the answer is: who cares?

Python is programmed to the pthreads API on Linux, so as long as NPTL isn't a buggy implementation of the standard, Python will run there. (well, Python bugs are possible too, but rarely observed in real life)

Python has never IMO been interested in getting absolute best speed in threading situations, favoring simplicity (and portability to non-linux, non-pthreads environments) and a small thread API. There's no reason an extension couldn't be added for systems using pthreads or NPTL to tweak these parameters, but I'd expect this to start in a third party library somewhere (I dunno, maybe zope or numarray) and move to the Python standard library later or never.

And then there's the whole Twisted cult, who will cut your heart out with an event-driven spoon if they hear you've been using threads...

Jeff

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