ESR "Waning of Python" post

[Thomas Jollans]

On 11/10/2018 09:11, Ben Finney wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> In actual fact, it's not a problem per-se. It's a design choice, and
>> every alternative choice tried so far has even worse problems. THAT is
>> why we still have it.
> 
> That reads to me like a rejection of the point made in the blog post:
> that the GIL prevents Python from taking proper advantage of multi-core
> machines.
> 
> In other words: Yes, it's a design decision, but that design decision
> causes the problems described.
> 
> Is it your position that the described behaviour is not a problem? Do
> you hold that position because you think multi-core machines are not a
> sector that Python needs to be good at? Or that the described behaviour
> doesn't occur? Or something else?
> 

I recently watched this talk by Raymond Hettinger on concurrency which 
gives some perspective on this question especially in the first ten 
minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zinZmE3Ogk

The gist is that the GIL is a problem only for relatively few problems 
(e.g. games that need limited-scale low-latency parallelism). Most of 
the time, you either only need one process in the first place, or you 
can take full advantage of your multi-core machine, or multiple 
multi-core machines, using multiple processes (with ipyparallel or whatever)