On Jun 19, 6:53 am, Ben Charrow <bchar...@csail.mit.edu> wrote: > Jure Erznožnik wrote: > > See here for introduction: > >http://groups.google.si/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/3... > > > Digging through my problem, I discovered Python isn't exactly thread > > safe and to solve the issue, there's this Global Interpreter Lock > > (GIL) in place. > > Effectively, this causes the interpreter to utilize one core when > > threading is not used and .95 of a core when threading is utilized. > > > Is there any work in progess on core Python modules that will > > permanently resolve this issue? > > Is there any other way to work around the issue aside from forking new > > processes or using something else? > > There is a group of people working on an alternative implementation to Python > that, among other things, will not have a > GIL:http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/
That's not a foregone conclusion. Well it's not a foregone conclusion that unladen-swallow will succeed at all, but even if it does they only say they intend to remove the GIL, not that they necessarily will. The GIL actually "solves" two problems: the overhead of synchronizing reference counts, and the difficulty of writing threaded extensions. The unladen-swallow team only address the first problem in their plans. So, even if they do remove the GIL, I doubt GvR will allow it to be merged back into CPython unless makes extensions are just as easy to write. That is something I have serious doubts they can pull off. Which means a GIL-less unladen-swallow is likely to end being another fork like IronPython and Jython. Those projects already have no GIL. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list