Stackless, SMP and The GIL

[Christian Tismer]

Christopher Saunter wrote:
> Greetings all!
> 
> A short question: is modifying (probably an understatement ;-) Python
> to remove the global interpreter lock likely to be 
> 
> (a) Easier
> (b) Harder
> (c) Indifferent
> 
> with stackless python over cpython?  I suspect (c), but I'd be
> interested to hear from anyone who knows better!

Here anyone answering:
I also suspect (c) for the following reason:
Stackless' implementation is nearly orthogonal
to Python's. That means, Python doesn't know
about Stackless (and gets really tricked into
thinking it was doing what it always did), and
so doesn't Stackless. It does not know about the
GIL, and it doesn't need it, because when it runs,
the GIL is always accquired.
In termas of that, Stackless is always switching
inside of a "clean-room" environment.

When I'm going to tackle asynchronous events and
"real" parallelism, this might become an issue.

probably-not-this-year - ly y'rs - chris
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