Re: Invitation to test cothread.catools release candidate

[Matt Newville <newville@cars.uchicago.edu>]

Hi Michael,

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 9:50 AM,  <michael.abbott@diamond.ac.uk> wrote:
> At http://controls.diamond.ac.uk/downloads/python/cothread in the git repository listed there I have pushed updates for
> both the current version of cothread (to shortly be released as version 2.6) and a Python 3 branch.
>
> I would be very grateful if anybody interested in using cothread.catools could check out the latest version from git and test
> this pre-release in your environment.  I've also posted links on the cothread page to downloads for this pre-release version.

Thanks, 2.6 built and installed on linux x86 and x86_64, but only
tested that caget() worked.   Building with Mingw failed for me on
Win32.   Any build hints for Win32?

And, sorry for the questions, but I've always been a little confused
by cothread.  Perhaps you could clarify some points for me?

Is there an advantage to using cothread over standard python threads?
Is the idea that you have concurrent processes using "coroutines with
yield" approach?    I'm afraid that I am missing an important
use-case, especially wrt CA when using preemptive callbacks.      Is
the principle issue that cothread tries to solve really with
concurrent CA threads, or is is concurrency between CA and something
else?     I'm sure this is just my lack of understanding,  but using
CA with preemptive callbacks work fine for me with and without
standard python threads, and I don't see an obvious need for more than
that.

Could you give a simple example of where the advantages of the
cothread approach really shine, perhaps something that cannot be done
well without it?

Thanks,

--Matt Newville