[Baypiggies] Guido's Blog: It isn't Easy to Remove the GIL

[Stephen McInerney]

[A great discussion of something complex which I was too timid to ask about 
on the list:]
Article: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235
Responses: http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=214235

- Essentially the GIL will not go away and the C-implementation of Python
will stay single-threaded, unless some code wizard _other than Guido_ goes 
through the effort of
removing it (e.g. for 3.0), and showing that its removal doesn't slow down 
single-threaded Python code.
- Includes description of the unpromising prior attempt at this on a fork of 
1.5 with 2x slowdown

Guido> "[...] I'd welcome it if someone did another experiment along the 
lines of Greg's patch (which I haven't found online), and I'd welcome a set 
of patches into Py3k only if the performance for a single-threaded program 
(and for a multi-threaded but I/O-bound program) does not decrease.

I would also be happy if someone volunteered to maintain a GIL-free fork of 
Python, in case that the single-threaded performance goal can't be met but 
there is significant value for multi-threaded CPU-bound applications. We 
might even end up with all the changes permanently part of the code base, 
but enabled only on request at compile time.

However, I want to warn that there are many downsides to removing the GIL. 
It complicates life for extension modules, who can no longer expect that 
they are invoked in a "safe zone" protected by the GIL -- as soon as an 
extension has any global mutable data, will have to be prepared with 
concurrent calls from multiple threads. There might also be changes in the 
Python/C API necessitated by the need to lock certain objects for the 
duration of a sequence of calls.

While it is my personal opinion, based upon the above considerations, that 
there isn't enough value in removing the GIL to warrant the effort, I will 
welcome and support attempts to show that times have changed. However, there 
is no point in pleading alone -- Python is open source and I have my hands 
full dealing with the efforts to produce a quality 3.0 language definition 
and implementation on time. I want to point out one more time that the 
language doesn't require the GIL -- it's only the CPython virtual machine 
that has historically been unable to shed it."

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