Progress on the Gilectomy

[Steve D'Aprano]

Larry Hastings is working on removing the GIL from CPython:

https://lwn.net/Articles/723949/


For those who don't know the background:

- The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) is used to ensure that only one piece of
code can update references to an object at a time.

- The downside of the GIL is that CPython cannot take advantage of multiple CPU
cores effectively. Hence multi-threaded code is not as fast as it could be.

- Past attempts to remove the GIL caused unacceptable slow-downs for
single-threaded programs and code run on single-core CPUs.

- And also failed to show the expected performance gains for multi-threaded
programs on multi-core CPUs. (There was some gain, but not much.)


Thanks Larry for your experiments on this!





-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.