Europython was excellent this year and while the range of talks was very wide, the main themes seemed to be web scripting and web applications, virtual machines and concurrency. Russel Winder gave a keynote on the future of multicore computers and their implications, and a longer talk about Python and the CSP style of concurrency, Michael Sparks gave a lightening talk about his work on Kamaelia, Andrew Francis talked about implementing ALTing in Stackless Python and Tony Ibbs talked about KBus, which is like DBus but sensible, and I gave an introductory talk on our python-csp project.
python-csp sprint report
Post-talks we had two days of Sprints and, having never been to a Sprint before I'm really amazed at how much we managed to get done in the python-csp sprint over such a short amount of time. I concentrated on the online tutorial which was well overdue for an overhaul, and the below is just a brief account of all our other activities -- apologies if I've missed anyone out or mis-attributed anything:
- Fabian Kreutz fixed and merged Russel's Python3 port into the default repository, closed a bunch of ancient branches, tidied up our strategy for importing the code library, fixed a whole load of bugs and hosted a Mercurial clone of the main repository on BitBucket for us.
- Russel started a MacOS port, found a whole world of issues with that, and fixed a few bugs.
- Richard Taylor joined us on the Friday and helped configure Linux to solve the "too many open files on disk" OS error that is thrown when too many channels or processes are created. Tony Heskett told us how to fix the same problem on Mac OS. Richard also gave us some really great ideas about how to use the POSIX standard to finish off Sam Wilson's work on a C implementation of channels.
- Joe Metcalfe, Wout Tankink, Urban Skudnik and others went through the tutorials in some detail, fixing bugs and posting a bunch of bug reports. Fabian tried to eliminate some of the dependencies from the examples and make them a bit easier to understand. Urban also wrote a channel poisoning example and the tutorial page that goes with it.
- Michael Sparks had to go home, but joined us over IRC and gave us a better understanding of the differences between Kamaelia and other asynchronous forms of message passing and the CSP style of programming. Later Michael produced a really interesting OCCAM model of one form of Kamaelia synchronisation primitive, which has been a good prompt to sort out guarded ALTing for python-csp.
- Stefan Swarzer went through our testing strategy and started formalising a really neat way to unit test python-csp code and wrote up some unit tests for the large number of built-in processes we have in the library. Stefan also got us thinking about licensing issues for python-csp, which probably deserves a wider discussion elsewhere.
- Andrew Francis dropped in briefly on his way to the PyPy sprint, and sent over a deadlock detection algorithm and some other ideas.
Thanks to everyone who came along to the Sprint, it was great fun and hopefully we can keep up some momentum. During the Sprint we added six new project members with commit privileges and set up a public mailing list. If you were at the Sprint or already had commit access to the repository you should already have received an invite to the list, but if not it is public so feel free to join.
