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[Python-Dev] Variant of removing GIL.

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sat Sep 17 18:44:09 CEST 2005 
At 12:32 PM 9/17/2005 -0400, Luis P Caamano wrote:
>My point is that not yielding speedups on multiprocessors
>and hurting performance on uniprocessors is not a good
>or valid reason to drop free-threading.

It is if you have only volunteers to maintain the code base, and the 
changes significantly increase maintenance complexity.  Also, a significant 
number of third-party C extensions would need to be modified for 
compatibility, as has already been pointed out.

Note also that Jython and IronPython exist, and run on VMs that address 
these issues, and that the PyPy project can generate code for many kinds of 
backends.  There's nothting stopping anybody from creating a 
multiprocessor-friendly backend for PyPy, for example.
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