[Twisted-Python] Possibly of interest

[Michael Sparks]

[ Please excuse me if this isn't of interest. I saw this and suspected that
 people here might be interested (whether agreed with or not) though - if
 it isn't, my apologies! ]

Hi,


I was forwarded a link to this paper just recently (and skimming the past
5-6 months of archives here it doesn't look like it's been posted to this
list). Since it looks interesting I thought I'd forward a copy to yourselves.

http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/index.html

Whilst the paper is a couple of years old, the comments are probably 
interesting because whilst it describes itself really as "threads are better 
than events" their implementation is based on C-Coroutine library (that 
doesn't use threads...) and suggests in its conclusions:

"In the future, we advocate tight integration between the compiler and the 
thread system, which will result in a programming model that offers a clean 
and simple interface to the programmer while achieving superior performance."

Which to me smacks of generators - which IMO can be viewed as just a different 
way of wrapping up the event stack. (Which doesn't entirely surprise me - one
of their influences listed in para 3 of the introduction was Inktomi's Traffic
Server - somewhere I worked before the BBC, and came to the same
conclusions they did. //Wrongly or rightly//, dunno :-)

(On an unrelated note: Tommi - after the discussions we had at Europython I 
came back and discussed general timelines for making our Kamaelia stuff work 
transparently with Twisted for an alpha stage. We came to the conclusion that 
we'd like to push that out to a 1.0.0 timeframe, which would probably be 
around a year from now. It gives us still the freedom in that respect to be 
able to answer "use twisted" when people ask us what they should use when 
using python for production servers :-) Also it means that /if/ we do achieve 
clean integration, that the answer won't change ;-)

Anyway, hopefully the paper is of interest (even if disagreed with!), if it 
isn't, my apologies!

Best Regards,


-- 
Michael Sparks, Senior R&D Engineer, Digital Media Group
Michael.Sparks at rd.bbc.co.uk, http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/
British Broadcasting Corporation, Research and Development
Kingswood Warren, Surrey KT20 6NP

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