[Python-Dev] Removing the GIL (Me, not you!) (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Thu Sep 13 12:11:21 CEST 2007

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

It's not just caches and counters. It's also every built-in type structure, builtin module, builtin function... any Python object that's a built-in, period. That includes things like None, True, and False.

Caches would include such things as the pre-created integers -100 through 255, the 1-byte character strings for chr(0)-chr(255), and the interned strings cache, to name a few. Most of these things I've mentioned are truly global, and not specific to an individual interpreter.

Pardon my ignorance but why does Python do reference counting for truly global and static objects like None, True, False, small and cached integers, sys and other builtins? If I understand it correctly these objects are never garbaged collected (at least they shouldn't) until the interpreter exits. Wouldn't it decrease the overhead and increase speed when Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF are NOOPs for static and immutable objects?

Christian

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