Please help with Threading

[Cameron Simpson]

On 20May2013 07:25, Fábio Santos <fabiosantosart at gmail.com> wrote:
| On 18 May 2013 20:33, "Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
| >         Python threads work fine if the threads either rely on intelligent
| > DLLs for number crunching (instead of doing nested Python loops to
| > process a numeric array you pass it to something like NumPy which
| > releases the GIL while crunching a copy of the array) or they do lots of
| > I/O and have to wait for I/O devices (while one thread is waiting for
| > the write/read operation to complete, another thread can do some number
| > crunching).
| 
| Has nobody thought of a context manager to allow a part of your code to
| free up the GIL? I think the GIL is not inherently bad, but if it poses a
| problem at times, there should be a way to get it out of your... Way.

The GIL makes individual python operations thread safe by never
running two at once. This makes the implementation of the operations
simpler, faster and safer. It is probably totally infeasible to
write meaningful python code inside your suggested context
manager that didn't rely on the GIL; if the GIL were not held the
code would be unsafe.

It is easy for a C extension to release the GIL, and then to do
meaningful work until it needs to return to python land. Most C
extensions will do that around non-trivial sections, and anything
that may stall in the OS.

So your use case for the context manager doesn't fit well.
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

Gentle suggestions being those which are written on rocks of less than 5lbs.
        - Tracy Nelson in comp.lang.c