Progress on the Gilectomy

[Skip Montanaro]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 1:53 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

> This was tried at least once, perhaps 15 years ago.


Yes, I believe Greg Smith (?) implemented a proof-of-concept in about the
Python 1.4 timeframe. The observation at the time was that it slowed down
single-threaded programs too much to be accepted as it existed then. That
remains the primary bugaboo as I understand it. It seems Larry has pushed
the envelope a fair bit farther, but there are still problems.

I don't know if the Gilectomy code changes are too great to live along the
mainline branches, but I wonder if having a bleeding-edge-gilectomy branch
in Git (maintained alongside the regular stuff, but not formally released)
would

a) help it stay in sync better with CPython
b) expose the changes to more people, especially extension module authors

Combined, the two might make it so the GIL-free branch isn't always playing
catchup (because of 'a') and more extension modules get tweaked to work
properly in a GIL-free world (because of 'b'). I imagine Larry Hastings has
given the idea some consideration.

Skip