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I can finally crawl out from under the rock I’ve been under to hap­pily pass on the news that Python 2.6 and 3.0 Beta 1 is offi­cially released. For those of you liv­ing on the moon — this release is espe­cially excit­ing for me for a few reasons:

1. PEP 371, the addi­tion of the pypro­cess­ing mod­ule (as the mul­ti­pro­cess­ing mod­ule) has been implemented.
2. This was my first seri­ous foray into core-development, so I learned a lot (some rather painfully/embarrassingly).
3. I ended up with com­mit priv­i­leges so I can help main­tain the new package/module. My first checkin was unfor­tu­nately a patch to dis­able some tests that came in with the package.
4. I killed the build­bots and delayed the beta.

Mad props/thanks need to be passed on to a few peo­ple — Ben­jamin Peter­son, Adam Olsen, Richard Oud­kerk and many oth­ers helped get this done and helped me debug var­i­ous prob­lems that were exposed after the new pack­age went in.

The docs for the pack­age are here (2.6 dev docs). It’s in both py3k and py2.6

I’ll be work­ing over the next few weeks on clean­ing up the tests, the build and the docs for the new pack­age. I wel­come sug­ges­tions and urge peo­ple to file bugs they find in the bug tracker. Of course, if you include a patch — that’s even better.

If you’re look­ing for some cooler-stuff with the pack­age: Look at the exam­ples. The final one is an exam­ple of how to use the pack­age to spread work amongst a clus­ter of machines.

You’re going to notice some­thing “spe­cial” about the pack­age included in python if you have worked with it in the past: The meth­ods have changed names. There was a dis­cus­sion on Python-Dev in the con­text of the package’s inclu­sion about whether or not to stick with “strict” thread­ing mod­ule API nam­ing, or to take this as a chance to move towards PEP 8-style nam­ing. We chose the lat­ter, and in fact the thread­ing mod­ule itself is get­ting re-worked over time to move to the same PEP-8 style nam­ing (tbd: I still need to pep this up). I think drop­ping the old Java-Style nam­ing and going with Pythonic nam­ing and access­ing of things will be a gen­er­ally Good Thing.

I’ve had to reit­er­ate this a few times — but since I’m cheer­lead­ing, I might as well do it again: I do not think that the addi­tion of this pack­age is the “sil­ver bul­let” for “con­cur­rency in python”. I also don’t think it will solve 100% of all the prob­lems out there for peo­ple. It’s use­ful, and a best of breed: but it is only one step in a larger move­ment. Adop­tion of Adam Olsen’s work, con­tin­u­ing to refine the mul­ti­pro­cess­ing pack­age, and think­ing about dis­trib­uted mes­sage pro­to­cols within the stdlib are just a few of the things we can do.

I’m seri­ously think­ing about doing a intro­duc­tion talk about the new package/concurrency stuff at pycon 09, although I don’t know how many peo­ple would be interested.

Doing all of this work also got me even more excited for 2.6 and 3.0 — I really do rec­om­mend peo­ple down­load the new builds and really ham­mer them, it’s impor­tant the final ver­sions be as bug-free as possible.

I can finally crawl out from under the rock I've been under to happily pass on the news that Python 2.6 and 3.0 Beta 1 is officially released. For those of you living on the moon - this release is especially exciting for me for a few reasons: PEP 371, the addition of the ...