by ZeroAerey25 . on Aug 13, 2007
Honest answers, courtesy of the friendly gaming press at Ten Ton Hammer.
A few weeks ago, CCP Games issued a press release that announced their successful upgrade of Stackless Python and that this upgrade would increase the speed of the gameplay for EVE Online players. However, the staff at Ten Ton Hammer (we were in San Diego at the time) found the press release to be interesting, albeit a bit short for our tastes. We wanted to know more; what had actually occurred in this update and why was it necessary? What is Stackless Python? Does anyone else use it as a programming language besides CCP? These were our questions, and (thanks to Valerie Massey) we were able to send those questions to Kristján "porkbelly" Jónsson, Senior Software Engineer for CCP. After you read the Q&A, you'll know that Kristján knows his tech and all of his answers are both informative and honest.
From the programmer's perspective, the language has had some features added that make programming in Python even more pleasant. Defaultdicts, for example, function decorators, generator expressions, ternary operators. All address common minor irritations and increase efficiency. We have also relaxed our position on multi-threading Python and the new Python core supports multi-threading there. We will start experimenting in the use of Python threads in conjunction with tasklets to try to reduce client side lag.
Read more here at Ten Ton Hammer.