Concurrency in Python

Are you a student? Want to contribute to an Open Source project and get paid for that? Apply to Google Summer of Code 2010 to work on gevent.

The Stackless Python’s ideas page for GSoC 2010 includes a gevent-related project.

The proposed idea is to enhance gevent’s core to

1. support Stackless Python in addition to greenlet
2. support non-libevent event loops

Stackless Python is an enhanced version of Python with microthreads built-in as well as other interesting features, like microthread pickling and thread-safe channels. The core function is similar to greenlet, which is a switching functionality from Stackless packaged as CPython extension. Other features of Stackless are not present in greenlet which is why it is desirable to port gevent to Stackless.

There are open source implementations of synchronous I/O for Stackless but they are not as comprehensive as gevent’s, which implements a compatible subset of the standard library and provides a way to patch the blocking functions in place.

Successfully undertaking this project would require deep understanding of Stackless API and gevent internals as well as having a good sense of design to keep things simple while making them more general.

Read the project description on the stackless website.

Feel free to ask about this project on the gevent mailing list.