James Y Knight wrote: > This just isn't true. Python can do an atomic increment in a fast > platform specific way.
The problem with this, from what I've heard, is that atomic increment instructions tend to be on the order of 100 times slower than normal memory accesses (I guess because they have to bypass the cache or do extra work to keep it consistent). If that's true, even a single-instruction atomic increment could be much slower than the currently used instruction sequence for a Py_INCREF or Py_DECREF. > It's quite possible the overhead of GIL-less INCREF/DECREF is still > too high even with atomic increment/decrement primitives, but AFAICT > nobody has actually tried it. I thought that's what the oft-cited previous attempt was doing, but maybe not. If not, it could be worth trying to see what happens. -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | Carpe post meridiem! | Christchurch, New Zealand | (I'm not a morning person.) | [EMAIL PROTECTED] +--------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
