Re: [Haskell-cafe] Python's big challenges, Haskell's big advantages?

Arnar Birgisson ha scritto:

Hi Manlio and others,

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 14:58, Manlio Perillo wrote:

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http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Shuttleworth-Python-needs-to-focus-on-fut...

"cloud computing, transactional memory and future multicore processors"

Multicore support is already "supported" in Python, if you use multiprocessing, instead of multithreading.

Well, I'm a huge Python fan myself, but multiprocessing is not really a solution as much as it is a workaround.

The real workaround is probably (and IMHO) multithreading (at least preemptive).

Python as a language has no problem with multithreading and multicore support and has all primitives to do conventional shared-state parallelism. However, the most popular /implementation/ of Python sacrifies this for performance, it has nothing to do with the language itself.

Stackless Python is an interesting implementation of the CSP+channels paradigm though. It has been quite successfully used for a few large projects.

There is also greenlets for cooperative multithreading (but without the scheduler and channels, so you can integrate it in your event loop like Twisted).

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And scalability is not a "real" problem, if you write RESTful web applications.

Of course scalability is a "real" problem, ask anyone who runs a big website. I don't see how RESTful design simply removes that problem.

If you use asynchronous programming and multiprocessing, you *do* solve most of the problems. This is what I do in the wsgi module for Nginx.

cheers, Arnar

Manlio Perillo