On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 17:48:14 +0200, Sybren Stuvel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >km enlightened us with: >> Is there any PEP to introduce true threading features into python's >> next version as in java? i mean without having GIL. > >What is GIL? Except for the Dutch word for SCREAM that is... > >> when compared to other languages, python is fun to code but i feel >> its is lacking behind in threading > >What's wrong with the current threading? AFAIK it's directly linked to >the threading of the underlying platform.
Only one thread per process can execute Python bytecode, even on an SMP system. The main bytecode eval loop is protected by a lock, the "Global Interpreter Lock". This doesn't prevent certain operations from being parallelized. For example, many of the I/O calls in Python release the GIL so that while they are blocked on the network or the disk, another thread can continue to execute. Extension modules which perform computationally intensive tasks can also release the GIL to allow better exploitation of SMP resources. Jean-Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list