[Python-3000] the future of the GIL (original) (raw)

Paul Du Bois paul.dubois at gmail.com
Thu May 10 08:23:01 CEST 2007

I'll just chime in tersely since this really seems like -ideas and not -3000 territory

On 5/9/07, Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:

modern consoles such as PS/3 and Xbox do not, since they have no support for virtual memory at all.

Well, they have virtual memory as in virtual address spaces, but they don't swap. Lack of fork() is more of a control thing.

Also remember that the PS/3 is supposed to be one of the poster children for multiprocessing -- the whole 'cell processor' thing. You can't write an efficient game on the PS/3 unless it uses multiple processors.

The PS3 is a good argument against having multiple threads in one interp. With the cell architecture you want to stay very far away from a shared memory threading model. The 8 "SPUs" in the cell run separate processes in their own address space (256K, code and data!), so the cell works best with a "multiple processes with tightly managed intercommunication channels" program architecture.

Thought experiment: Suppose you were writing and brand-new dynamic language today, designed to work efficiently on multi-processor systems.

Let's see... it would make state sharing difficult and asynchronous communication easy!

paul

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