[Python-Dev] STM and python

[Matt Joiner]

Given GCC's announcement that Intel's STM will be an extension for C
and C++ in GCC 4.7, what does this mean for Python, and the GIL?

I've seen efforts made to make STM available as a context, and for use
in user code. I've also read about the "old attempts way back" that
attempted to use finer grain locking. The understandably failed due to
the heavy costs involved in both the locking mechanisms used, and the
overhead of a reference counting garbage collection system.

However given advances in locking and garbage collection in the last
decade, what attempts have been made recently to try these new ideas
out? In particular, how unlikely is it that all the thread safe
primitives, global contexts, and reference counting functions be made
__transaction_atomic, and magical parallelism performance boosts
ensue?

I'm aware that C89, platforms without STM/GCC, and single threaded
performance are concerns. Please ignore these for the sake of
discussion about possibilities.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/TransactionalMemory
http://linux.die.net/man/4/futex