by Christian Tismer - Armin Rigo for EuroPython 2012
This talk gives a good overview of the status of Stackless Python:
Its history from the beginning, its current status and its future development to be expected. A discussion and comparison with similar approaches like Greenlet, Eventlet and how they relate is also included.
Stackless Python 1.0 was started in 1998 as an implementation of true continuations, with all implied complications.
In 2002, Stackless 2.0 was born, a complete rewrite. Continuations were abandoned in favor of the much easier to comprehend tasklets - one-shot continuations that could resume their current state just once, like Coroutines.
In 2004, Stackless 3.0 was created, which merged the 2.0 features with a new concept: so-called “Soft-Switching”, which made the Pickling of Program State” possible.
As a consequence, a few recent application make solely use of Program State Pickling, which changes the purpose of Stackless Python quite a bit. One example of this is the “Nagare Web Framework” which will be shown in examples.
In the light of the popularity of a Stackless spin-off, called “Greenlet”, the concept of a new Stackless branch will be depicted: Stackless, written as a pure extension module on top of Greenlets, which includes State Pickling - a feature that seemed to be impossible to implement without changing CPython.
But the impossible and ways to get around it was always a major topic in this project, which is going to augment what Stackless on PyPy already can do.
Christian Tismer, creator of Stackless Python
Perhaps with Armin Rigo as a guest, talking about Stackless status in PyPy. Otherwise, I will insert this myself.
cheers – Chris
