"aurora" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hello!
Just gone though an article via Slashdot titled "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" [http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm]. It argues that the continous CPU performance gain we've seen is finally over. And that future gain would primary be in the area of software concurrency taking advantage hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
Perhaps something the Python interpreter team can ponder.
Well, yes. However, it's not as bad as it looks. I've spent a good part of my professional life with multiprocessors (IBM mainframes) and I have yet to write a multi-thread program for performance reasons. All of those systems ran multiple programs, not single programs that had to take advantage of the multiprocessor environment. Your typical desktop is no different. My current system has 42 processes running, and I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of them aren't multi-threaded.
There are a relatively small number of places where multi-threading is actually useful; many programmers will never run into an application where they need to use it.
I think it would be a good idea for the Python team to address decent support for multiprocessors, but I hardly think it is a crisis.
John Roth
-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
