Re: php and multithreading (additional arguments)

Hi!

Eve Online in Stackless Python fmspy.org <http://fmspy.org> with stackless python etc.

I don't know how python does it but PHP has a lot of global context, and sharing this global context between threads, whatever they are (OS threads, user-space threads, etc.) would be massively complex thing tp manage either for the engine or for the user.

    And something like GIL feels like a reasonable compromise to me.

GIL would mean dreams about multicore stuff are just dreams, but beyond that even with GIL, what do you do if you checked for class_exists and it didn't exist, and you're about to load it when other thread loads it before? Etc., etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that in your code. The fact that GIL protects you from C-level context changes doesn't mean it'd protect you from PHP-level context changes, like some code using some data structure and other code changing it (on C level it'd be ok - no memory corruption, etc. - but on PHP level it might totally break your code). It's not to say it can't be done, but I didn't see yet coherent proposal for any threads implementation that had also good use cases.

I think PHP is the last from the major scripting languages on the market without some kind of thread support. (Cannot find a good comparsion, but Ruby, Python, Perl does some)

And "keeping up with Joneses" is not a good use case. -- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com