On Feb 13, 9:07 pm, Maric Michaud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've heard of a bunch of arguments to defend python's choice of GIL, but I'm > not quite sure of their technical background, nor what is really important > and what is not. These discussions often end in a prudent "python has made a > choice among others"... which is not really convincing.
Well, INAG (I'm not a Guru), but we recently had training from a Guru. When we brought up this question, his response was fairly simple. Paraphrased for inaccuracy: "Some time back, a group did remove the GIL from the python core, and implemented locks on the core code to make it threadsafe. Well, the problem was that while it worked, the necessary locks it made single threaded code take significantly longer to execute." He then proceeded to show us how to achieve the same effect (multithreading python for use on multi-core computers) using popen2 and stdio pipes. FWIW, ~G -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
