This is a classic case of the "GCC is broken" phenomenon. Only this time it was with Thrift ( Read more... )

While working on finding performance bottlenecks on a project at work, I had to create a load testing framework. Now if we were talking apache, there's no dearth of tools, the most notable being http_load and a new tool found by one of my colleagues, pylotNo such luck, however, for Thrift. So I set out to create such a tool by myself. I took one of ( Read more... )

As a continuation of my previous post, let me mention what happened with the Thrift experiment I blogged about some time back ( Read more... )

This isn't the first time I'm writing a blog post to sing praises of Python, the programming language, but still, go ahead and read ESR's quote in my earlier postAnyhow, lately I've been busy writing what I call a "web service delivery platform", which is what required me to hack a lot (~125 lines) of Python. While writing this thing, I was just ( Read more... )

Often times you need to write wrappers or proxies that are required to support "forwarding functions", i.e. functions that just forward requests to similarly named functions, or do something parametrised by function name. The tedious way to do it is something like this:

class C ( Read more... )

We've just started moving some of the baseline application stuff to Python services running on independent app servers (no, not like J2EE app servers). One of the key aspects to consider in such a setup is the scalability of the bridge between the webserver and app server ( Read more... )

So, things were never too simple in C++ world when it came to funky formatting while doing all the cin cout business. So, Python also follows C-like format specification strings and it's all happy and cool most of the time. Except, when it comes to shit like this:

print args = dict([x for x in mydict.items() if x[0] in ['xx', 'yy', 'zz', 'aa', 'bb ( Read more... )

Often you need to disable try/except blocks while debugging code because you want to find out the point of occurrence of the exception and other info which is swallowed by the block that catches the exception. With languages that use braces for block demarcation, it's as easy as simply commenting out the try and catch/except lines, minding the ( Read more... )

I just bumped into Eric S. Raymond's notes on Python while I was searching for addition of ad hoc members in Python classes. He wrote something that caught my attention as being very insightful and something that I can identify with, yet couldn't articulate as well as he:

My second came a couple of hours into the project, when I noticed (allowing ( Read more... )

List Comprehensions
The more time I spend with Python, the more I come to like it. The latest in the list (no pun intended) of likable Python-foo is List Comprehensions. What's that? We'll come to it in a bit but now for some background building ( Read more... )