[Python-Dev] Fwd: Removal of GIL through refcounting removal.

[Curt Hagenlocher]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Josiah Carlson <josiah.carlson at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:51 PM, <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>    Antoine> I think it is important to remind that the GIL doesn't prevent
>>    Antoine> (almost) true multithreading. The only thing it prevents is
>>    Antoine> full use of multi-CPU resources in a single process.
>>
>> I believe everyone here knows that.  I believe what most people are
>> clamoring for is to make "full use of their multi-CPU resources in a
>> single
>> process".
>>
>
> Which is, arguably, silly.  As we've seen in the last 2 months with Chrome,
> multiple processes for a single "program" is actually a pretty good idea.
>  With the multiprocessing module in the standard library offering a
> threading-like interface, people no longer have any excuses for not fully
> exploiting their multiple cores in Python.
>

There is no shortage of algorithms (such as matrix multiplication) that are
parallelizable but not particularly good candidates for an IPC-based
multiprocessing paradigm.

--
Curt Hagenlocher
curt at hagenlocher.org
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