a basic bytecode to machine code compiler

Chris Colbert sccolbert at gmail.com
Sat Apr 2 23:25:30 EDT 2011


>
>
> That's quite an interesting idea.  I do think a lot of production Python
> code implicitly depends on the GIL and would need rework for multicore.
> For example, code that expects "n += 1" to be atomic, because the
> CPython bytecode interpreter won't switch threads in the middle of it.
> --
>

Yes it will. The interpreter may switch threads between any of these
bytecode instructions.

In [8]: dis.dis(compile('n += 1', '', 'single'))
  1           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (n)
              3 LOAD_CONST               0 (1)
              6 INPLACE_ADD
              7 STORE_NAME               0 (n)
             10 LOAD_CONST               1 (None)
             13 RETURN_VALUE


Proof:

In [15]: n = 0

In [16]: class Foo(threading.Thread):
   ....:     def run(self):
   ....:         global n
   ....:         for i in range(10000):
   ....:             n += 1
   ....:
   ....:

In [17]: threads = [Foo() for i in range(5)]

In [18]: for thread in threads:
   ....:     thread.start()
   ....:
   ....:

In [19]: n
Out[19]: 37433
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20110402/4ce882c9/attachment.html>


More information about the Python-list mailing list