[Python-Dev] Fwd: Removal of GIL through refcounting removal.

[Adam Olsen]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Eric Smith wrote:
>
>> I'd gladly trade deterministic destruction (due to reference counting or
>> any other mechanism) for improved performance.
>
> Another thing to consider is that refcounting spreads out the
> time spent doing GC evenly over the execution of the program,
> so that you don't get pauses occurring at random times.
>
> Sometimes in games I've found that I had to disable cyclic
> GC in order to get smooth frame rates. With no refcounting
> I wouldn't have the option of doing that. I'd be disappointed
> if that meant I could no longer use Python for these kinds of
> games.

I consider realtime games to be an essential use case and will be
pursuing incremental GC with my experiments.


-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus