On Wednesday 20 May 2009 06:16:39 pm Aahz wrote: > >While I agree that the GIL greatly simplifies things for the > >interpreter, I don't understand this statement. In practice, you should > >lock all critical sections if you expect your code to be used in a > >multithreading environment. That can't be different from what Java, C# > >or any other languages do, including C++. Why is that so expensive in > >python extensions, that it is used as an argument against removing the > >GIL? > > Python is intended to be simple/easy to integrate with random C > libraries. Therefore you have to write explicit code from the C side in > order to drop the GIL.
Erm, that doesn't really answers the question. If there were no GIL, the C code called from python would be just as unsafe as the C code called from C. And if "not thread-safe, you take care of the locking" notices are enough for the original libraries (and a lot of other languages, and even python constructs), the C extension could always grab the locks. There must be another reason (i.e, the refcounts) to argue _for_ the GIL, because this one just seems to be just an attempt to fix unsafe code when called from python. And that was my point. Refcounts + interpreter simplicity seem to imply the need for a GIL, but to make unsafe code safe without fixing said code (or even thinking about it) is a weird goal... specially if it became the only reason for a GIL. After all, one could argue for that goal in almost all languages. -- Luis Zarrabeitia (aka Kyrie) Fac. de Matemática y Computación, UH. http://profesores.matcom.uh.cu/~kyrie -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
