[Python-Dev] [ANN]: "newthreading" - an approach to simplified thread usage, and a path to getting rid of the GIL

[Jesse Noller]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 9:29 AM, Michael Foord
<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> On 26/06/2010 07:11, John Nagle wrote:
>>
>> We have just released a proof-of-concept implementation of a new
>> approach to thread management - "newthreading". It is available
>> for download at
>>
>> https://sourceforge.net/projects/newthreading/
>>
>> The user's guide is at
>>
>> http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/newthreadingintro.html
>
> The user guide says:
>
> The suggested import is
>
> from newthreading import *
>
> The import * form is considered bad practise in *general* and should not be
> recommended unless there is a good reason. This is slightly off-topic for
> python-dev, although I appreciate that you want feedback with the eventual
> goal of producing a PEP - however the introduction of free-threading in
> Python has not been hampered by lack of synchronization primitives but by
> the difficulty of changing the interpreter without unduly impacting single
> threaded code.
>
> Providing an alternative garbage collection mechanism other than reference
> counting would be a more interesting first-step as far as I can see, as that
> removes the locking required around every access to an object (which
> currently touches the reference count). Introducing free-threading by
> *changing* the threading semantics (so you can't share non-frozen objects
> between threads) would not be acceptable. That comment is likely to be based
> on a misunderstanding of your future intentions though. :-)
>
> All the best,
>
> Michael Foord

I'd also like to point out, that one of the project John cites is Adam
Olsen's Safethread work:

http://code.google.com/p/python-safethread/

Which, in and of itself is a good read.