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

[Arnar Birgisson]

Hi again,

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 15:13, Bruce Eckel <bruceteckel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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