On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Arnar Birgisson <arna...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >From the discussion about getting rid of the GIL lately, what I read > from it is that reference counting is the main obstacle. My question > is, why aren't hardware supported atomic increments and decrements > being used for the reference counters? As far as I'm told they are > available on most modern platforms (on x86 it is the LOCK instruction > prefix) True. > and these incur little overhead. False, due to the costs of maintaining cache coherency. I'd be very happy with pointers to previous discussion on the matter > or simple arguments why this would not apply to the Python reference > counting mechanism. > Adam Olsen actually tried it. See: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-September/074645.html Other message in that thread describe the problem in more detail. -- Daniel Stutzbach, Ph.D. President, Stutzbach Enterprises, LLC <http://stutzbachenterprises.com>
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