[Python-Dev] Threading idea -- exposing a global thread lock
Phillip J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Mar 14 20:30:57 CET 2006
At 02:21 PM 3/14/2006 -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
>There _is_ some variation in what "critical section" means, exactly,
>to different thread programming cultures, but in none does it mean:
>
> a section of code such that, once a thread enters it, all other
> threads are blocked from doing anything for the duration
Well, I'm showing my age here, but in the good ol' days of the 8086
processor, I recall it frequently being used to describe a block of
assembly code which ran with interrupts disabled - ensuring that no task
switching would occur.
Obviously I haven't been doing a lot of threaded programming *since* those
days, except in Python. :)
>The common meaning is:
>
> a section of code such that, once a thread enters it, all other
> threads are blocked from entering the section for the duration
That doesn't seem like a very useful definition, since it describes any
piece of code that's protected by a statically-determined mutex. But you
clearly have more experience in this than I.
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