Progress on the Gilectomy
Steve D'Aprano
steve+python at pearwood.info
Sat Jun 10 08:54:38 EDT 2017
Larry Hastings is working on removing the GIL from CPython:
https://lwn.net/Articles/723949/
For those who don't know the background:
- The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) is used to ensure that only one piece of
code can update references to an object at a time.
- The downside of the GIL is that CPython cannot take advantage of multiple CPU
cores effectively. Hence multi-threaded code is not as fast as it could be.
- Past attempts to remove the GIL caused unacceptable slow-downs for
single-threaded programs and code run on single-core CPUs.
- And also failed to show the expected performance gains for multi-threaded
programs on multi-core CPUs. (There was some gain, but not much.)
Thanks Larry for your experiments on this!
--
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.
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