[Python-ideas] The future of Python parallelism. The GIL. Subinterpreters. Actors.

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 20:21:56 -0700
Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> If you need shared-memory threads, on multiple cores, for CPU-bound
> logic, where the logic is implemented in Python, then yeah, you
> basically need a free-threaded implementation of Python. Jython is
> such an implementation. PyPy could be if anyone were interested in
> funding it [1], but apparently no-one is. Probably removing the GIL
> from CPython is impossible. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong.)

It's not that it's impossible, it's that everyone trying to remove it
ended up with a 30-40% slowdown in a single-threaded mode (*).  Perhaps
Larry manages to do better, though ;-)

(*) a figure which I assume is highly workload-dependent

Regards

Antoine.