[Python-Dev] GIL removal question (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Aug 10 13:42:22 CEST 2011

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 9:32 PM, David Beazley <dave at dabeaz.com> wrote:

On Aug 10, 2011, at 6:15 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

PyPy would actually make a significantly better basis for this kind of experimentation, since they don't use reference counting for their memory management. That's an experiment that would pretty interesting.  I think the real question would boil down to what else do they have to lock to make everything work.   Reference counting is a huge bottleneck for CPython to be sure, but it's definitely not the only issue that has to be addressed in making a free-threaded Python.

Yeah, the problem reduces back to the 4 steps in the original post. Still not trivial, since there's quite a bit of internal interpreter state to protect, but significantly more feasible than dealing with CPython's reference counting. However, you do get additional complexities like the JIT compiler coming into play, so it is really a question that would need to be raised directly with the PyPy dev team.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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