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The idea of waiting with a progress indicator has a large bug, on an 8-bit or 16-bit machine you cannot read or write atomically from a progress variable. I guess the code works because of the interpreter lock that cripples python but it's very bad hygeine in all languages.

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Can you elaborate 1) why you can't r/w atomatically from a progress variable (even if it's a byte?), 2) why are we writing Python code for 8-bit or 16-bit machines, and 3) why is it bad to take advantage of our language's guarantees on execution, e.g. with Python and JavaScript?

Not every processor supports atomic memory accesses.

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