Parallelization on muli-CPU hardware?

[P.M.]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<fmy8d.32815$Z14.12044 at news.indigo.ie>...
> 
> I agree that it could potentially be a serious hindrance for cpython if 
> "multiple core" CPUs become commonplace. This is in contrast to jython 
> and ironpython, both of which support multiple-cpu parallelism.
> 
> Although I completely accept the usual arguments offered in defense of 
> the GIL, i.e. that it isn't a problem in the great majority of use 
> cases, I think that position will become more difficult to defend as 
> desktop CPUs sprout more and more execution pipelines.

I wonder if Python could be changed to use thread local storage?  That
might allow for multiple interpreter instances without the GIL (I've
never looked at the actual code so I'm just hypothesizing).  I took a
quick look at Lua today and it has no problems with creating multiple
instances of the interpreter, so it definately is a solvable problem.