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

[Charles Merriam]

At the risk of fanning the flames, here is a random vignettes:

Many years ago at a dinner with Bjarne Stroustrup (of C++ fame),
Bjarne laid out , on the back of a napkin, a graph of parallel
programming fads over thirty years.  His premise was that it took
about sixty operations to fully switch a process and about one to just
change the PC register.  On one point of the fad, everything was a
separate process communication over RPC (or a common file, or a shared
buffer, or, now, an XML stream) and people would complain about the
swizzeling involved and the cost of switching processes.   A new fad
would emerge where a bit more careful specification was required by
the programmer in return for less swizzeling  and better performance.
 Another fad would move to light weight threads with more care
required by programmers to avoid subtle bugs.  Eventually, each thread
would be required to mange its own concurrency system in a blindly
fast execution.  Then the cycle would reverse, with some new
improvements preventing esoteric bugs at the cost of some performance.
  He charted the period at about eight years.

Now in Python, we worry about the overhead of the interpreter
footprint.  Are we still just chasing this cycle around?


On 9/14/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Read this:
>
> http://marknelson.us/2007/07/30/multicore-panic/
>
> On 9/14/07, Andy Wiggin <andywiggin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not quite following you... I'm just talking about what the
> > hardware is going to be like, and my understanding of the type of
> > software that will be able to take advantage of it. The complexity is
> > being driven by our good friends the CPU vendors, and the realities of
> > device physics and IC packaging. Whether or not it's easy to program,
> > I think that's the kind of hardware we're going to get.
> >
>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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