Michael Foord wrote:
If (for example) Unladen Swallow were to (eventually) be successful in removing the GIL and moved away from reference counting then it would be possible to retain binary API (ABI) compatibility with extensions written for 'standard' CPython.
The GIL is simply faked. IronPython code is not restricted by the GIL but only one code path into Ironclad can acquire the GIL at a time.
For reference counting we have a hybrid system keeping 'bridge' objects alive whilst the C extension has a reference to them but they may or may not be in use from the IronPython side.
Something I've long been curious about (but never even come close to having the time to research) is the idea of using CPython extensions with PyPy. It sounds like that would involve an effort in a similar vein to porting Ironclad to Jython (i.e. porting the back end to PyPy instead). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------