[capi-sig] PyGILState_Ensure/PyGILState_Release

[Stefan Behnel]

Bob Rossi, 27.06.2012 18:24:
> I'm really having trouble understanding the python threading model.
> 
> It's clear to me from the docs,
>   http://docs.python.org/py3k/c-api/init.html?highlight=initthread
> that I need to initialize python as so when requiring the use of
> threads,
>   Py_Initialize();
>   PyEval_InitThreads();

Are you embedding Python in another program? Otherwise, you don't need to
do that. Python will do it on normal startup.


> Then, after that point, in each new thread, I should use
>   PyGILState_STATE state = PyGILState_Ensure();
>   // python code
>   PyGILState_Release(state);
> 
> A few questions arise which do not seem to be documented clearly.
> 
> It's not clear to me if a call to Ensure locks python into
> executing only in that thread until Release is called

Yes. It's locking on the GIL. That's a single lock that protects the whole
Python runtime.


> Based on my confusion above, I'm wondering if I can
> wrap the Ensure/Release calls around the entire new thread,
> or should this be done around a small snippet of python code?

The latter. It's more common to free it around code that you want to run in
parallel (most commonly blocking I/O code) than to acquire it around code
that you want to run serialised. But that's mostly just a matter of putting
it. In any case, unless you use multiple interpreters (and doing so is not
trivial), only one thread can run Python code at a time.

Stefan