- Process — contains all the kernel resources, shared between troops and threads
- Troop — group of threads sharing a common set of resource limits (language‐enforced)
- Thread — group of tasks, uses m-n to map to kernel threads, each thread may be very light weight
- Task — cooperatively scheduled using the yield keyword
Multiple threads may be running concurrently on a multi‐cpu server, and this leads to some restrictions. No mutable objects may be shared between them, only immutable ones. The exception is thread-safe builtins, which use the appropriate low-level mechanisms to do atomic updates.
A group of threads that can directly access each other's objects is called a troop, because they trust each other not to include malicious objects. A thread that isn't trusted would be in a different troop, and would be required to use proxy objects and explicit copies for all accesses (although simple objects like numbers or strings may be optimized).
A threading model such as this accomplishes many goals:
- Security. You can run untrusted bits of code, such as in a web browser.
- SMP. All CPUs could be utilized.
- Performance. By not allocating large stacks or kernel resources for every thread, you can easily have thousands (or millions!) of threads on a single server.
- Reliability. Only safe operations are permitted across threads, preventing the corruption and race conditions which plague C code.
- Ease of Programming. A task using Python 2.5's yield keyword is the closest you can get to traditional blocking code, letting you avoid the spaghetti code of event‐driven programming.
