[Python-Dev] Fwd: Removal of GIL through refcounting removal. (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Nov 2 19:13:18 CET 2008

Hi,

Jesse Noller <jnoller gmail.com> writes:

If python were to have free threading, courtesy of a lack of the GIL, it would help those people quite a bit. Sometimes you just need shared state. Myself? I used multiprocess and threads all the time for various reasons.

I think it is important to remind that the GIL doesn't prevent (almost) true multithreading. The only thing it prevents is full use of multi-CPU resources in a single process. But if you are using threads to reduce latencies rather than increase throughput, the GIL isn't really an obstacle (it probably makes things a bit worse than a free-threading scenario, but not that much; and you can tweak sys.setcheckinterval()).

Regards

Antoine.

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