GIL detector

[Grant Edwards]

On 2014-08-17, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano schrieb am 17.08.2014 um 16:21:
>> I wonder whether Ruby programmers are as obsessive about
>> Ruby's GIL?
>
> I actually wonder more whether Python programmers are really all that
> obsessive about CPython's GIL.

[...]

> Personally, I like the GIL. It helps me keep my code simpler and more
> predictable. I don't have to care about threading issues all the time and
> can otherwise freely choose the right model of parallelism that suits my
> current use case when the need arises (and threads are rarely the right
> model). I'm sure that's not just me.

Those are pretty much my feelings exactly.  I've been writing Python
apps for 15 years.  They're mostly smallish utlities, network and
serial comm stuff, a few WxWidgets and GTK apps, some IMAP, SMTP and
HTTP stuff. Many are multi-threaded, and some of the mesh data
analysis and visualization ones ran for a few 10's of minutes.  I
don't remember a single instance where the GIL was even as much as
annoying.  The GIL means that multi-threaded apps most "just work" and
you don't have to sprinkle mutexes all over your code the way you do
in C using pthreads.  You do sometimes need to use mutexs in Python,
only at a higher layer -- there's a whole lower layer of mutexes that
you don't need because of the GIL.

-- 
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