Will multithreading make python less popular?

Hyuga hyugaricdeau at gmail.com
Tue Feb 17 15:31:50 EST 2009


On Feb 16, 4:34 am, rushen... at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> I am an engineer. I am trying to improve my software development
> abilities. I have started programming with ruby. I like it very much
> but i want to add something more. According to my previous research i
> have designed a learning path for myself. It's like something below.
>       1. Ruby (Mastering as much as possible)
>       2. Python (Mastering as much as possible)
>       3. Basic C++ or Basic Java
> And the story begins here. As i search on the net,  I have found that
> because of the natural characteristics of python such as GIL, we are
> not able to write multi threaded programs. Oooops, in a kind of time
> with lots of cpu cores and we are not able to write multi threaded
> programs. That is out of fashion. How a such powerful language doesn't
> support multi threading. That is a big minus for python. But there is
> something interesting, something like multi processing. But is it a
> real alternative for multi threading. As i searched it is not, it
> requires heavy hardware requirements (lots of memory, lots of cpu
> power). Also it is not easy to implement, too much extra code...
>
> After all of that, i start to think about omiting python from my
> carrier path and directly choosing c++ or java. But i know google or
> youtube uses python very much. How can they choose a language which
> will be killed by multi threading a time in near future. I like python
> and its syntax, its flexibility.
>
> What do you think about multi threading and its effect on python. Why
> does python have such a break and what is the fix. Is it worth to make
> investment of time and money to a language it can not take advantage
> of multi cores?

Though I'm sure this has already been shot to death, I would just add
that maybe the better question would be: "Will Python make
multithreading less popular?"  My answer would be something along the
lines of, that would be nice, but it just depends on how many people
adopt Python for their applications, realize they can't use threads to
take advantage of multiple CPUs, ask this same bloody question for the
thousandth time, and are told to use the multiprocessing module.



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