Hi, I know the Global Interpreter Lock ensures that only one python thread has access to the interpreter at a time, which prevents a lot of situations where one thread might step on another's toes.
But I'd like to ask about a specific situation just to be sure I understand things relative to some code I'm writing. I've got a dictionary which is accessed by several threads at the same time (that is, to the extent that the GIL allows). The thing is, however, no two threads will ever be accessing the same dictionary items at the same time. In fact the thread's ID from thread.get_ident() is the key to the dictionary; a thread only modifies items corresponding to its own thread ID. A thread will be adding an item with its ID when it's created, and deleting it before it exits, and modifying the item's value in the meantime. As far as I can tell, if the Python bytecodes that cause dictionary modifications are atomic, then there should be no problem. But I don't know that they are because I haven't looked at the bytecodes. Any feedback on this would be appreciated. For various reasons, we're still using Python 2.3 for the time being. Gary -- Gary Robinson CTO Emergent Music, LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] 207-942-3463 Company: http://www.goombah.com Blog: http://www.garyrobinson.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
