On Apr 17, 6:40 am, Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'd love to be wrong about that, but the GIL *has* been the subject of > extensive efforts to kill it over the last five years, and it has > survived despite the best efforts of the developers. >
To add to that... In my mind, I see three options for multi-process systems: (1) Locks. (2) A global lock (GIL) (3) Learning to live with the possibility of things disappearing out from under you. In the SQL world, they chose (3). In the Java/C++/C# world, they chose (1). I like Python's compromise a lot, even though it means in a single process, you can only have one thread doing Python at a time. Usually the bits I want to parallelize on are blocking system calls to the network or disk anyway, or the result of a long calculation that updates its result all at once. So having the OS handle the tough bits while I program in a fantasy world where threads are an illusion is fine with me. Discovering a way to get rid of the GIL and not have to do (1) and (3) is truly exciting, but I've lost hope a long time ago. Besides, if it gets in the way I can always do something novel like, I don't know, spawn another Python process? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
