[Twisted-web] Having reactor run at the main thread make things harder for late adopters

[Andrew McNabb]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 02:55:37AM -0000, glyph at divmod.com wrote:
>
> This is almost certainly true, and as I've already said I am keenly  
> interested in de-globalizing the reactor myself; making it easier to  
> test things is a key reason for doing so.  However, we should be aware  
> of the risks and try to mitigate them.  It could well be that we could  
> come up with an API which is smooth as glass for the "good" use-cases we  
> have in mind here, and raises exceptions or emits helpful warnings when  
> used for the "bad" ones.  Maybe that's not possible, maybe we can only  
> get halfway there: but it would be nice to try.

I think we really agree for the most part.

>> - k threads that each have their own reactor
>
> This is a whole other, almost unrelated can of worms.  You can only use  
> Twisted from one thread at a time.  There are things which make  
> assumptions about non-reentrancy and mutual exclusion of global module-  
> level state.  You can find and fix every instance of this if you want,  
> but don't bundle it in with multiple reactors :).

Now that you mention that, I have noticed that a few times when reading
Twisted code.  I think that long-term, it's nice to remove global
module-level state wherever possible, but in the meantime, just putting
the above paragraph in the docs as a warning is probably sufficient.


>> If I wanted to be constantly told "you can't do that, it's impossible",
>> I wouldn't be a Python guy.  If I want to shoot myself in the foot,
>> that's my problem.  :)
>
> Another bogus argument.  There are lots of things that are "impossible"  
> in Python.  For example, you "can't" change the values of a tuple, or  
> the contents of a string.  I mean, there's terrible stuff you can do  
> with ctypes, but if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.  Similarly,  
> there are lots of things that already kind of work, by accident, if you  
> instantiate multiple reactors; you can kind of re-set a reactor if you  
> know exactly what to twiddle.

Let me rephrase that, then.  I think that in Python, the goal is usually
to create a flexible API and to document how it should be properly used
rather than creating barriers to stop people from doing something just
because it might be a bad idea in some contexts.


> When I say it's nice to be able to say that something's impossible, that  
> doesn't mean that I don't want to support all the reasonable use-cases,  
> just that boundaries are a useful tool.  This is very much the Python  
> idiom - consider your options for indenting your code in strange ways,  
> for example :).

Again, I think we agree for the most part.

-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55  8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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