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

Adam Olsen rhamph at gmail.com
Mon Nov 3 09🔞13 CET 2008

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Eric Smith wrote:

I'd gladly trade deterministic destruction (due to reference counting or any other mechanism) for improved performance. Another thing to consider is that refcounting spreads out the time spent doing GC evenly over the execution of the program, so that you don't get pauses occurring at random times. Sometimes in games I've found that I had to disable cyclic GC in order to get smooth frame rates. With no refcounting I wouldn't have the option of doing that. I'd be disappointed if that meant I could no longer use Python for these kinds of games.

I consider realtime games to be an essential use case and will be pursuing incremental GC with my experiments.

-- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus

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