[Python-ideas] Ideas towards GIL removal

[Aahz]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Brett Cannon wrote:
>>
>> And I know some people love the (mostly) instantaneous garbage
>> collection when the refcount should be at 0.
>
> Yeah, and even a 6 millisecond pause could be too long in some
> applications, such as high frame rate animation.  6 milliseconds is a
> *long* time for today's GHz processors.

Hrm.  Assuming that really is the maximum, I don't think it's an issue
for Python applications: 6ms slices still allow for >150 frames/sec.  If
overall object creation/destruction throughput is increased or this
allows greater throughput on multi-core machines without dramatically
decreasing performance for single-CPU machines, it may well be
worthwhile.

But my primary concern remains the issue of Python being a glue language
with external libraries: the GIL is one of our best weapons for making
it easy.  This approach seems like it would be easier to integrate than
other options I've seen.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

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