Hi again,
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 15:13, Bruce Eckel
Well, I'm a huge Python fan myself, but multiprocessing is not really a solution as much as it is a workaround. 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.
Actually, no. Neither Python nor Ruby can utilize more than a single processor using threads. The only way to use more than one processor is with processes.
I wanted to make a distinction between the language and its implementation. I think you are conflating the two. If you read the Python specification there is nothing preventing you from running on two cores in parallel. The standard library does indeed have semaphores, monitors, locks etc. In fact, I'm pretty sure the Jython implementation can use multiple cores. It is just CPython that can't, as is very well known and advertised. cheers, Arnar