On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 9:09 PM, David Beazley <dave@dabeaz.com> wrote:
You're forgetting step 5.
5. Put fine-grain locks around all reference counting operations (or rewrite all of Python's memory management and garbage collection from scratch). ... After implementing the aforementioned step 5, you will find that the performance of everything, including the threaded code, will be quite a bit worse. Frankly, this is probably the most significant obstacle to have any kind of GIL-less Python with reasonable performance.
PyPy would actually make a significantly better basis for this kind of experimentation, since they *don't* use reference counting for their memory management. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia