Re: Twisted has a home on Chandler Wiki
On May 31, 2004, at 7:03 PM, John Anderson wrote:
> I was thinking Macintosh OS 9, which had everything going through the
> main event loop. Unfortunately, this lead to very clunky multitasking
> (if you can remember that long ago) and didn't work very well. Things
> got much better when OS 10 came around and used threads.
I think that the choice between the threads and async model comes down
to knowing what problem needs to be solved. Clearly both models have
their shortcomings and are not appropriate in all circumstances. That
said, it's my personal opinion that the async model is most appropriate
for systems that need to deal with multiple network I/O sources. While
the async model does introduce its own set of programming challenges,
my experience has been that (with the right toolkit) it's easier for
the average developer to use/build robustly on an asynchronous system.
> I thought threads would actually scale better as we move towards
> multprocessor machines, but maybe I'm missing something here.
> Integrating with GUI apps may be a little different in Chandler since
> most, if not all, the data in Chandler just shows up in the repository
> as items and the GUI thread gets notified that new data is available
> to display. I presume the OS support issue is that not all OS's have
> good thread implementations. This is no longer a problem for Win32,
> Mac OSX, or Linux -- our target machines. However, this is really a
> moot point for Python, however, since it runs all it's threads in a
> single OS thread..
I've had the opportunity to work on some massively scalable network
servers and the best model that has emerged is a predominantly async
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