Adding a Par construct to Python?

[Carl Banks]

On May 20, 8:59 am, Luis Zarrabeitia <ky... at uh.cu> wrote:
> On Monday 18 May 2009 10:31:06 pm Carl Banks wrote:
>
> > Even if you decided to accept the penalty and add locking to
> > refcounts, you still have to be prepared for context switching at any
> > time when writing C code, which means in practice you have to lock any
> > object that's being accessed--that's in addition to the refcount lock.
>
> While I agree that the GIL greatly simplifies things for the interpreter, I
> don't understand this statement. In practice, you should lock all critical
> sections if you expect your code to be used in a multithreading environment.
> That can't be different from what Java, C# or any other languages do,
> including C++. Why is that so expensive in python extensions, that it is used
> as an argument against removing the GIL?

I wasn't really arguing that locking individual objects was a
significant penalty in computer time, only in programmer time.  The
locks on reference counts are what's expensive.

Also, I'm not using it as an argument against removing the GIL.  I
want to remove the GIL.  I'm only pointing out that removing the GIL
is not easy, and once it's removed there is a cost.


Carl Banks