I'm writing a Sublime Text plugin that provides multiple Python shells accessible via UNIX sockets. Each shell should act as a standalone REPL running on its own thread. (It is undesirable for these shells to have their own processes; sharing a single process is an absolute requirement.)

The builtin exec() function prints output to stdout if the code is an expression that does not evaluate to None. I need to send this output over the socket instead.

I know that this can be done by patching stdout. However, this would not work here because multiple consoles may be running in multiple threads (plus the built-in console).

My ideas are as follows:

• Try to compile() the input with mode='eval', eval() it, and print the result (if not None). If it won't compile, try mode='exec' instead of mode='single'.
• For each console's thread, keep the output stream in thread-local storage. Patch sys.stdout with an object that checks for these streams before calling "regular" stdout.
• Somehow provide a patched sys to each console.

These don't seem like great ideas. Is there a better one?

I'm writing a Sublime Text plugin that provides multiple Python shells accessible via UNIX sockets. Each shell should act as a standalone REPL running on its own thread. (It is undesirable for these shells to have their own processes; sharing a single process is an absolute requirement.)

The builtin exec() function prints output to stdout if the code was compiled with mode='single' and is an expression that does not evaluate to None. I need to send this output over the socket instead.

I know that this can be done by patching stdout. However, this would not work here because multiple consoles may be running in multiple threads (plus the built-in console).

My ideas are as follows:

• Try to compile() the input with mode='eval', eval() it, and print the result (if not None). If it won't compile, try mode='exec' instead of mode='single'.
• For each console's thread, keep the output stream in thread-local storage. Patch sys.stdout with an object that checks for these streams before calling "regular" stdout.
• Somehow provide a patched sys to each console.

These don't seem like great ideas. Is there a better one?