[Python-Dev] bytearray and array.array are not thread-safe

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hello,

Short story: bytearray and array.array by construction allow user code to
reallocate their internal memory buffer. But a raw pointer to the said buffer
can also be obtained by another thread, and used after releasing the GIL (for
CPU-intensive operations like compression). As a consequence, the interpreter
crashes.

Was it envisioned? I see no warning in the docs for the array.array type
(although it has been there for quite some time).

See http://bugs.python.org/issue3139 (reported by Amaury)

Regards

Antoine.