[Python-Dev] Experimenting with STM on CPython (original) (raw)

Charles-François Natali neologix at free.fr
Wed Apr 11 16:27:55 CEST 2012

Yes, that's using STM on my regular laptop.  How HTM would help remains unclear at this point, because in this approach transactions are typically rather large --- likely much larger than what the first-generation HTM-capable processors will support next year. Ok. I guess once the code is there, the hardware will eventually catch up. However, I'm not sure what you consider "large". A lot of manipulation operations for the builtin types are not all that involved, at least in the "normal" cases (read: fast paths) that involve no memory reallocation etc., and anything that can be called by and doesn't call into the interpreter would be a complete and independent transaction all by itself, as the GIL is allowed to be released between any two ticks.

Large as in L2-cache large, and as in "you won't get a page fault or an interrupt, you won't make any syscall, any I/O..." ;-)

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