official python was still python to get python under cygwinit had to be built from its source code if this is still required when you read thismake sure you have gcc and make installed on your cygwinthen fetch python' source code package from python orgunpack itand build python with the usual commands/configure make make test sudo make install this will install python as python the same procedure works on all unix-like platformson os and cygwinthe executable is called python exeelsewhere it' named python you can generally skip the last two of the above steps if you're willing to run python out of your own build directory be sure to also check if python is standard cygwin package by the time you read thiswhen building from source you may have to tweak few files ( had to comment-out #define in modules/main )but these are too specific and temporal to get into here threads threads are another way to start activities running at the same time in shortthey run call to function (or any other type of callable objectin parallel with the rest of the program threads are sometimes called "lightweight processes,because they run in parallel like forked processesbut all of them run within the same single process while processes are commonly used to start independent programsthreads are commonly used for tasks such as nonblocking input calls and long-running tasks in gui they also provide natural model for algorithms that can be expressed as independently running tasks for applications that can benefit from parallel processingsome developers consider threads to offer number of advantagesperformance because all threads run within the same processthey don' generally incur big startup cost to copy the process itself the costs of both copying forked processes and running threads can vary per platformbut threads are usually considered less expensive in terms of performance overhead simplicity to many observersthreads can be noticeably simpler to programtooespecially when some of the more complex aspects of processes enter the picture ( process exitscommunication schemesand zombie processescovered in shared global memory on related notebecause threads run in single processevery thread shares the same global memory space of the process this provides natural and easy way for threads to communicate--by fetching and setting names or objects accessible to all the threads to the python programmerthis means that things like global parallel system tools