global interpreter lock

[Paul Rubin]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:
> > I don't see much point in trying to convince programmers that
> > they don't really want concurrent threads. They really do. Some
> > don't know how to use them, but that's largely because they
> > haven't had them. I doubt a language for thread-phobes has much
> > of a future.
> 
> The real problem is that the concurrency models available in currently
> popular languages are still at the "goto" stage of language
> development.  Better models exist, have existed for decades, and are
> available in a variety of languages.

But Python's threading system is designed to be like Java's, and
actual Java implementations seem to support concurrent threads just fine.

One problem with Python is it doesn't support synchronized objects
nearly as conveniently as Java, though.  You need messy explicit
locking and unlocking all over the place.  But it's not mysterious how
to do those explicit locks; it's just inconvenient.