[Python-Dev] Summing up (original) (raw)

geremy condra debatem1 at gmail.com
Wed May 19 18:27:36 CEST 2010

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Tue, 18 May 2010 21:43:30 +0200

Regardless of the fact that apparently noone reported it in real-world conditions, we could decide that the issue needs fixing. If we decide so, Nir's approach is the most rigorous one: it tries to fix the problem thoroughly, rather than graft an additional heuristic. Nir also has tested his patch on a variety of machines, more so than Dave and I did with our own patches; he is obviously willing to go forward.

Right now, there are two problems with Nir's proposal: - first, what Nick said: the difficulty of having reliable  high-precision cross-platform time sources, which are necessary for  the BFS algorithm. Ironically, timestamp counters have their own  problems on multi-core machines (they can go out of sync between  CPUs). gettimeofday() and clockgettime() may be precise enough on  most Unices, though. - second, the BFS algorithm is not that well-studied, since AFAIK it  was refused for inclusion in the Linux kernel; someone in the  python-dev community would therefore have to make sense of, and  evaluate, its heuristic.

I don't have the expertise to do this, but I'll be playing with the patch over the next few weeks, so if there's a specific piece of data you want, let me know.

Geremy Condra

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