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

Jean-Paul Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Thu Feb 15 04:42:08 CET 2007

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16🔞40 +1300, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

[snip]

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.

Thomas already pointed this out, but I'm repeating it anyway. This vision represents an impossible reality at present. You will not get Gtk or Qt or wxWidgets to use Python's event notification API. If you are really very interested in solving this problem, go to the developers of each platform those toolkits run on and sell them on a unified event notification API. Once they have adopted, implemented, and deployed it, you can go to the Gtk, Qt, and wxWidgets teams and tell them to port all of their code to that new API. Then, you can have a unified model in Python.

Until then, the practical compromise with almost zero negative consequences (sometimes, one extra piece of configuration will be required - compare this to how the logging module works ;) is to optionally allow explicit reactor selection.

Jean-Paul

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