Hi Matt,
I won't have time for a considered reply for a bit; in particular, I think I'll have to actually write an proper implementation of catools using callbacks for a really considered reply (as I said before, the error handling is particularly troublesome as the flow of control gets scattered), and that's got to wait its turn, maybe a suitable soggy day.
However I think I can sensibly respond to your conclusion straight away.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> So, if I understand correctly, a principle motivation is that you
> prefer many threads over relying on pre-emptive callbacks. With that
> preference, thread "weight" becomes a serious issue, so much so that
> you cannot rely on standard python threads. Is that a fair
> assessment?
Not unfair, though historically slightly backwards: an equally strong motivation is avoiding event callbacks at an inconvenient time. Or, to reiterate an earlier point, cothread allows the naive, lazy or busy programmer to avoid having to worry about thread synchronisation and locking issues, because diversion of flow of control can only happen at well defined and easy to understand places. I suspect this is a bigger win than most people realise.
I've just checked with James who did the original work that led up to cothread and cothread.catools and the history is rather interesting: it turns out that the original motivation for using coroutines (or "greenlets" as the library we used called them) was to avoid problems with Qt3 caused by triggering Qt operations from the wrong thread, and this problem was encountered before working on channel access bindings. In other words, coroutines were introduced precisely to avoid a thread synchronisation problem with Qt.
As for callback driven versus thread driven code, yes, I am arguing that threaded code is clearer, but it does seem that more examples are needed.
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