[Python-Dev] Extension modules, Threading, and the GIL

[holger krekel]

Tim Peters wrote:
> [...]
> I'd also like to postulate that proposed solutions can rely on a new Python
> C API supplying a portable spelling of thread-local storage.  We can
> implement that easily on pthreads and Windows boxes, it seems to me to cut
> to the heart of several problems, and I'm willing to say that Python
> threading doesn't work anymore on other boxes until platform wizards
> volunteer code to implement this API there too.

FWIW, I am pretty confident that this can be done (read: copied) as 
Douglas Schmidt has implemented it (on more platforms than python 
supports <wink>) in the Adapative Communication Framework (ACE):

http://doc.ece.uci.edu/Doxygen/Beta/html/ace/classACE__TSS.html

As usual, Douglas Schmidt also presents a detailed platform 
analysis  and research about his implementation:
 
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/PDF/TSS-pattern.pdf

"This paper describes the Thread-Specific Storage pattern, which
alleviates several problems with multi-threading performance and
programming complexity. The Thread-Specific Storage pattern improves
performance and simplifies multithreaded applications by allowing
multiple threads to use one logically global access point to retrieve
thread-specific data without incurring locking overhead for each
access."

regards,

    holger