[Python-3000] the future of the GIL
Talin
talin at acm.org
Sun May 6 02:57:51 CEST 2007
tomer filiba wrote:
> the only way to overcome this with cpython is to Kill The GIL (TM),
> and since it's a very big architectural change, it ought to happen
> soon. pushing it further than version 3.0 means all library authors
> would have to adapt their code twice (once to make it compatible
> with 3.0, and then again to make it thread safe).
>
> i see all hell has broken loose here, PEP-wise speaking, but i really
> hope there's still time to consider killing the GIL at last.
I've brought up this issue as well, but the consensus seems to be that
this is just too hard to even consider for 3.0.
Note that Jython and IronPython don't have the same restrictions in this
regard as CPython. Both VMs are able to run in multiprocessing
environments. (I don't know whether or not Jython/IronPython even have a
GIL or not.)
My suggested approach to making CPython concurrent is to first tackle
the problem of garbage collection in a multiprocessing environment. Once
that is done, the next piece would be to address the issues of thread
safety of the interpreter's internal data structures.
At one point, I started working on a generic, concurrent garbage
collector that would be useful for a variety of interpreted languages
such as Python, but I haven't had time to work on it lately. Its similar
to the Boehm collector, except that it's designed for "cooperative"
languages in which the collector knows about the structure of objects.
When I last worked on it, I had gotten the "young generation" collection
working, and I had just finished implementing the global heap, and was
in the process of writing unit tests for it. I hadn't started on
old-generation collection or cross-generation reference tracking.
-- Talin
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