On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Nick Coghlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Neil Schemenauer wrote: >> Sigurd Torkel Meldgaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> For a student project in a course on virtual machines, we are >>> evaluating the possibility to experiment with removing the GIL >>> from CPython >> >> Hi, >> >> It's great to hear of this kind of project. I think what you want >> to do is difficult but possible. The major compilcation would be >> that extension modules would have to re-written since they all >> assume a reference counting GC. A foreign function interface like >> CMU Lisp's "alien" or GHC's FFI is not necessarily any worse but it >> does place different demands on extension module authors. > > Michael Foord's comment about the way Ironclad does it suggests a > possible interim step that would allow existing extensions to be used at > the cost of some additional overhead: use free threading in the core, > but have an "extension module lock" that cuts things back to a single > thread whenever non-core code is invoked.
Ahh, or do it per object! Convert the core to use a precise GC references, but retain the refcount API as a sort of forced unknown reference. Needs bodging to retain our current handling of cycles in refcounted objects, but it should be doable, and it potentially has a lot less overhead (and is more scalable) than what I've got now with safethread. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
