On Wednesday, 16 August 2023 at 04:20:21 UTC-4 Thierry Dumont wrote: With PEP 703, Cpython will move (slowly) to a non GIL implementation, allowing true multi-threading. It will take time (-> 3.15) and will be optional at the beginning. See: https://peps.python.org/pep-0703/ Which consequences for the Python part of Sage ? Are there many parts which could be multi-threaded ?
For each library used, we'll need to assess if it can operate in a thread-safe way and if it currently is used in a thread-safe way. There are some parts that will be fundamentally very hard to make multi-threaded: maxima through the ECL binary interface, for instance, will probably fundamentally be problematic. The design of maxima is rather fundamentally not multi-threaded, but even if you lock maxima to only run in one thread, there will be problems to let it operate in a multi-threaded process: ECL itself does support multi-threaded operation, but requires signal handling control (*particularly* when it's multi-threaded, because signals are used to coordinate critical sections garbage collection), so currently upon entry of ECL, it swaps the signal handlers and upon exit swaps them back. As far as I know, signal handlers are on process level; not thread-local. So I don't think we'll be able to allow multiple threads safely whenever ECL is entered. Perhaps the ECL people are willing to consider developing other designs that are more appropriate for supporting ECL as a library (it is "embedded common lisp" after all) in a multi-threaded environment or perhaps we can integrate ECL's signal handling requirements more closely with those of sagemath so that switching the handlers is no longer required. Note that in sage it is very hard to predict which libraries get invoked when running high-level code, because operations may get dispatched depending on implementation details of objects (which, for instance, for finite fields, may depend on the field size!) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/297ca580-2f4e-4436-9d16-221625d9f027n%40googlegroups.com.
