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

skip at pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Thu Sep 13 15:26:50 CEST 2007 

Jon> To put it another way, would it actually matter if the reference
Jon> counts for such objects became hopelessly wrong due to non-atomic
Jon> adjustments?

I believe this was suggested and tried by someone (within the last few years). It wasn't any benefit. The costs of special-casing outweighed the costs of uniform reference counting, not to mention the code got more complex. Or something like that. Anyway, it didn't work.

Just thinking out loud here, what if ... we use atomic test-and-set to handle reference counting (with a lock for those CPU architectures where we haven't written the necessary assembler fragment), then implement a lock for each mutable type and another for global state (thread state, interpreter state, etc)? Might that be close enough to free threading to provide some benefits, but not so fine-grained that lock contention becomes a bottleneck?

Skip

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