Why GIL? (was Re: what's the point of rpython?)

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> CPython's "primitive" storage management has a lot to do with the
> simplicity of interfacing CPython with external libraries.  Any solution
> that proposes to get rid of the GIL needs to address that.

This, I don't understand.  Other languages like Lisp and Java and
Haskell have foreign function interfaces that easier to program than
Python's, -and- they don't use reference counts.  There's usually some
primitive to protect objects from garbage collection while the foreign
function is using them, etc.  The Java Native Interface (JNI) and the
Haskell FFI are pretty well documented.  The Emacs Lisp system is not
too hard to figure out from examining the source code, etc.