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

Curt Hagenlocher curt at hagenlocher.org
Mon Nov 3 19:59:23 CET 2008

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Josiah Carlson <josiah.carlson at gmail.com>wrote:

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

Antoine> I think it is important to remind that the GIL doesn't prevent Antoine> (almost) true multithreading. The only thing it prevents is Antoine> full use of multi-CPU resources in a single process. I believe everyone here knows that. I believe what most people are clamoring for is to make "full use of their multi-CPU resources in a single process". Which is, arguably, silly. As we've seen in the last 2 months with Chrome, multiple processes for a single "program" is actually a pretty good idea. With the multiprocessing module in the standard library offering a threading-like interface, people no longer have any excuses for not fully exploiting their multiple cores in Python.

There is no shortage of algorithms (such as matrix multiplication) that are parallelizable but not particularly good candidates for an IPC-based multiprocessing paradigm.

-- Curt Hagenlocher curt at hagenlocher.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20081103/5f5c0751/attachment.htm>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list