[FRPythoneers] Are lists threadsafe?

[Alex Martelli]

On 2004 Mar 09, at 02:19, Cameron Laird wrote:
    ...
> 1.  I'm a big proponent of that wisdom:  I frequently
>     advocate concurrency-through-event-orientation,
>     and do indeed claim it both more scalable and
>     easier.

Sure, I entirely agree with that.  These days I'm developing web 
applications on top of Twisted (and nevow) and find yet another total 
confirmation of that.

> 2.  The quoted package often gets me to giggling.  To
>     observe that "adding threads ... is often not a
>     successful strategy" is, it strikes me, uncharac-
>     teristically coy of the *Cookbook*.  I'll be expli-
>     cit:  introduction of threads can sometimes--perhaps
>     even frequently--SLOW performance, not just fail to
>     improve it.

What you say is true, particularly when threading is "just thrown into 
the mix" without careful architecting.  However, there is a small but 
non-empty "niche" of programs that cannot entirely rely on event-driven 
async I/O and can get benefit from a judicious application of 
threading.  P. 404 in the Nutshell, the very last paragraph of the 
chapter on optimization, mentions the general conditions (not 
thoroughly enough -- I should have also mentioned multi-processor boxes 
and heavy computations performed by C-coded routines that run without 
holding the GIL as one of the typical pre-reqs for such rearchitecting 
to provide performance enhancements).


Alex