[Python-Dev] Software Transactional Memory for Python (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Aug 27 14:40:35 CEST 2011

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 8:45 PM, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote:

Hi all,

About multithreading models: I recently made an observation which might be obvious to some, but not to me, and as far as I know not to most of us either.  I think that it's worth being pointed out :-) http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/2011-August/008153.html

Having a context manager to say "don't release the GIL" for a bit could actually be really nice (e.g. for implementing builtin-style method semantics for data types written in Python).

However, two immediate questions come to mind:

  1. How does the patch interact with C code that explicitly releases the GIL? (e.g. IO commands inside a "with atomic:" block)
  2. Whether or not Jython and IronPython could implement something like that, since they're free threaded with fine-grained locks. If they can't then I don't see how we could justify making it part of the standard library.

Interesting idea, though :)

Cheers, Nick.

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

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