[Python-Dev] GIL removal question

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 9:09 PM, David Beazley <dave at dabeaz.com> wrote:
> You're forgetting step 5.
>
> 5. Put fine-grain locks around all reference counting operations (or rewrite all of Python's memory management and garbage collection from scratch).
...
> After implementing the aforementioned step 5, you will find that the performance of everything, including the threaded code, will be quite a bit worse.  Frankly, this is probably the most significant obstacle to have any kind of GIL-less Python with reasonable performance.

PyPy would actually make a significantly better basis for this kind of
experimentation, since they *don't* use reference counting for their
memory management.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia