If locking is expensive on x86, it's implemented wrong. It's done right in QNX, with inline code for the non-blocking case. Not sure about the current libraries for Linux, but by now, somebody should have gotten this right.
John Nagle Paul Rubin wrote: > Maric Michaud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>>"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." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list