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Comment by amethyst | Hacker News Reader

> Python makes it incredibly tough.

I disagree, Python makes it incredibly easy to work with threads in many different ways. It just doesn't make threads faster.

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In what way? Threading, asyncio, tasks, event loops, multiprocessing, etc. are all complicated and interact poorly if at all. In other languages, these are effectively the same thing, lighter weight, and actually use multicore.

If I launch 50 threads with run away while loops in Python, it takes minutes to laumch and barely works after. I can run hundreds of thousands and even millions of runaway processes in Elixir/Erlang that launch very fast and processes keep chugging along just fine.

> If I launch 50 threads with run away while loops in Python, it takes minutes to laumch and barely works after. I can run hundreds of thousands and even millions of runaway processes in Elixir/Erlang that launch very fast and processes keep chugging along just fine.

I'm not sure that argument helps your position on threading. I once saw a java program spin off 3000 threads doing god knows what. Debugging the fucking thing was impossible.

The point there is that processes in Elixir and Erlang are effectively like functions, in that you do not need to "manage" them in any sort of way. They are automatically distributed across all cores, pre-emptively scheduled, killable, have a built-in inbox, etc. One doesn't need to worry about what concurrency library to use nor manually create mailboxes using queues or whatever else. It just works, and you fire them off to do whatever you need. So there is no ceremony. Threads in many other languages and in Python in particular, require a huge amount of ceremony and management.

> require a huge amount of ceremony and management

I think Java made it quite easy to spin off threads, and again, it doesn't help the argument. It just made the f'ing thing worse. Race conditions are still f'ing hard to solve. Particularly when a shared-mutable-state exists outside of the program.

The whole purpose of threads is to improve overall speed of execution. Unless you're working with a very small number of threads (single digits), that's a very hard to achieve goal in Python. I wouldn't count this as easy to use. It's easy to program, yes, but not easy to get working with reasonably acceptable performance.

And the python people would just point to multiprocessing...which works pretty well.

Which has its own set of challenges and yet another implementation of queue.

Yes, but the shared-mutable-state issue goes away.

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