[Python-Dev] Threading idea -- exposing a global thread lock (original) (raw)

Samuele Pedroni pedronis at strakt.com
Tue Mar 14 08:34:59 CET 2006

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

it doesn't translate reasonably to Jython or IronPython, it's really tricky to implement,

FWIW, someone on the newsgroup suggested implementing this via a slight modification to sys.checkinterval(). The idea was that a None argument would translate to "stop-checking" and the active thread would do a few steps atomically and then restore the original value. The new with-statement makes that a piece of cake.

there's no sys.checkinterval in Jython. Implementing this would need the introduction of some kind of GIL implementation in Jython, the JVM has no primitive for global critical sections. A GIL is something users of Jython don't want. Even with that is way too easy to have non-Jython threads around that could manipulates Java objects you are seamlessy dealing with. That is of course true for CPython and C extension initiated threads too, but is probably harder to be oblivious of such things in CPython context.

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