[Python-Dev] Fwd: Removal of GIL through refcounting removal.

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 10:31 AM, Eric Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>
>> No offense taken. The V8 experience makes me feel much more optimistic
>> that they might actually pull this off. (I'm still skeptical about
>> support for extension modules, withougt which CPython is pretty lame.)
>
> The need to modify all extension modules is the usual non-starter I see
> mentioned when this topic comes up. The OP really needs to think about that
> issue.

It's a non-starter for immediate world-domination. But if they get the
core to be significantly faster I expect there will be motivation to
port extensions. There's also the PyPy effort to replace extension
modules with ctypes-based wrappers. I could also imagine that
extensions could be run in a sandbox that *does* use the equivalent of
the GIL.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)