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

Jean-Paul Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Fri Sep 14 23:59:06 CEST 2007

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:43:39 -0400, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:

On Sep 14, 2007, at 3:30 PM, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote: On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:13:47 -0500, Justin Tulloss <tulloss2 at uiuc.edu> wrote:

Your idea can be combined with the maxint/2 initial refcount for

non-disposable objects, which should about eliminate thread-count updates for them. --

I don't really like the maxint/2 idea because it requires us to differentiate between globals and everything else. Plus, it's a hack. I'd like a more elegant solution if possible. It's not really a solution either. If your program runs for a couple minutes and then exits, maybe it won't trigger some catastrophic behavior from this hack, but if you have a long running process then you're almost certain to be screwed over by this (it wouldn't even have to be very long running - a month or two could do it on a 32bit platform). Not true: the refcount becoming 0 only calls a dealloc function.. For objects which are not deletable, the dealloc function should simply set the refcount back to maxint/2. Done.

So, eg, replace the Py_FatalError in none_dealloc with an assignment to ob_refcnt? Good point, sounds like it could work (I'm pretty sure you know more about deallocation in CPython than I :).

Jean-Paul

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