[Python-Dev] Twisted Isn't Specific (was Re: Trial balloon: microthreads library in stdlib) (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Thu Feb 15 04🔞40 CET 2007

Thomas Wouters wrote:

If the choice for reactor was made somewhere deep inside the library, how does it know to use the GTK reactor?

In my ideal world, there wouldn't actually be a gtk reactor -- there would only be a Linux reactor, a MacOSX reactor, a Windows reactor, etc. Things like pygtk would be adapted to hook into the platform's standard reactor.

Less ideal would be for pygtk to intall a gtk reactor when it gets imported. The danger with this approach is that two libraries could fight over which kind of reactor to use.

You suggest that the top level could choose some other reactor that is compatible with both libraries. That seems like a rather hit-and-miss approach -- such a reactor might exist, or it might not. If not, you're out of luck. And the chance of finding a suitable reactor gets smaller as the number of libraries increases.

The reason the decision should be made at the topmost level is that this is the most visible and adaptive location.

This is where my vision is fundamentally different: you shouldn't have to make a decision in the first place. All event-driven libraries should be made to use the same substrate on any given platform. Then they can coexist without the need for any top-level choices.

I know that will be hard to do, but it's the only way out of this mess that I can see.

-- Greg

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