[Python-3000] Kill GIL?

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

"Andre Meyer" <meyer at acm.org> writes:

> While I understand the difficulties in removing the GIL and the
> potential negative effect on single-threaded applications I would
> very much encourage discussion to seriously consider removing the
> GIL (maybe optionally) in Py3k.

I suppose this would require either fundamentally changing the garbage
collection algorithm (lots of work and breaking all C extensions),
or accompanying all reference count adjustments with memory barriers
(a significant performance hit even if a particular object is not
shared between threads; many objects like None will be shared anyway).

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/