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Progress on the Gilectomy

Robin Becker robin at reportlab.com
Tue Jun 13 12:09:52 EDT 2017 
On 11/06/2017 07:27, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
........
> 
> I'm tired of people complaining about the GIL as a "mistake" without
> acknowledging that it exists for a reason.
> 
> 
> 
I thought we were also consenting adults about problems arising from bad 
extensions. The GIL is a blocker for cpython's ability to use multi-core cpus.

I looked at Larry's talk with interest. The GIL is not a requirement as he 
pointed out at the end, both IronPython and Jython don't need it.

That said I think the approach he outlined is probably wrong unless we attach a 
very high weight to preserving the current extension interface. C extensions are 
a real nuisance.

The contention issues all arise from reference counting. Newer languages like go 
seem to prefer the garbage collection approach. Perhaps someone should try a 
reference-countectomy, but then they already have with other python implementations.
-- 
Robin Becker
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