Parallel Python or Ruby? | Better HN

20 comments

14 comments · 6 top-level

throttle18y ago· 4 in thread

Haven't you heard about the egregious buffer overflow vulnerabilities found recently in Ruby? Not a good idea to use it for anything serious in light of those, IMO.

jrockway18y ago

I'm not a Ruby fan, but wouldn't finding those buffer overflows make it more secure? Now that they've been found, they're fixed. (Sure, it could be indicative of overall careless design, but I don't think that's the case here. A few silly mistakes, now no longer a problem.)

Finally, Ruby has more than one implementation. Finding a hole in one implementation says nothing about the language overall.

tptacek18y ago

Yes. Everyone else: find a large C codebase that has shipped without an integer overflow. Go ahead. I'm waiting.

throttle18y ago

The mistakes are so amateurish that it should raise questions about the rest of the codebase (i.e. the defects which are yet to be found)...

tptacek18y ago

Haven't you heard about JF's talk at PH-Neutral and the memory corruption vulns they found in Python and Perl? Not a good idea to use those for anything serious either. I guess we're all stuck with Erlang.

kilowatt18y ago· 1 in thread

Keep in mind that Python 2.6 already has the new multiprocessing package, which presents a simple interface for multiprocess computation.

I'd like to poke around with Python's compiler module and look at the AST--you could enforce that a certain class of functions have no side effects, and then spawn multiple processes to execute them semi magically.

Futures like the ones in IO (http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/git/checkout/Io/docs/IoGuide.h...) always struck me as a pretty cool way to abstract away synchronization problems. Using the multiprocess stuff as a background would be fun.

randomhackOP18y ago

Hmm is poking around the AST necessary? What about looking at the bytecode instead?

dhotson18y ago· 1 in thread

One change to ruby that would be useful, would be to make Enumerable.collect run in parallel.

There's probably a whole bunch of other Enumerable methods that could be made to run in parallel as well.

fizx18y ago

gem install facets require "rubygems" require "facets/thread" %w[a b c].threaded_map{|str| puts str }

It's multicore if you're using jruby.

Kaizyn18y ago· 1 in thread

Hello randomhack,

Have you heard of Stackless Python? That might be what you are looking for. http://www.stackless.com/

randomhackOP18y ago

I have read a bit about stackless. Neat implementation but it still suffers from GIL? You can launch thousands of microthreads but apparently they still run on single core?

tzury18y ago· 1 in thread

Do we have here a solution looking for a problem?

tptacek18y ago

Very yes.

jrockway18y ago

If you use Coro with Perl, you can say something like:

  async {
    do_something;
    cede;
    do_something;
  }

  do_something_else;
  cede;

See http://search.cpan.org/dist/Coro/Coro.pm for more information.

[Edit: If you want to see a continuation-based web framework built with Coro, look at Continuity: http://search.cpan.org/~awwaiid/Continuity-0.994/lib/Continu...

It's very cool.]

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