how to write thread-safe module ? and pytz

[Bryan Olson]

nicolas_riesch wrote:
 > Does someone know if the module pytz
 > (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytz/) is thread-safe ?

On that, I don't know.

 > That's because in the file pytz/tzinfo.py, I see global variables
 > _timedelta_cache, _datetime_cache, _ttinfo_cache, which are
 > dictionnaries and are used as cache.
 > I always thought that you must protect shared data with locks when
 > multithreading, but I don't see any lock anywhere in pytz.

Definitely stick with what you always thought.

 > However, pytz seems to work well with multiple threads creating various
 > timezone objects at the same time.

Buggy threading can seem to work well for along time. It may be
a billion-to-one shot that a thread switch happens at just the
wrong time.

 > I don't understand where the trick is, that allows multiple threads to
 > access this module without any locking and that all this seems to work
 > without any problem...
 >
 > Does this mean that there is a means to write a module that is
 > thread-safe, without importing the threading module and creating locks
 > ?
 >
 > Or have I not understood something ...?
 >
 > Can someone give me a hint ?

In the current Python implementation, more things are atomic
than the language guarantees to be atomic. Programmers should
not depend on that behavior. Again, I don't know anything about
pytz, but we wouldn't bother with locks and semaphores and such
if we could make the problems go away just by ignoring them.


-- 
--Bryan