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A comment on Python Language Summit: Python Without the GIL. Parent comment

Re:Python Language Summit: Python Without the GIL by mikepurvis on Thursday May 12, 2022 @06:44AM (#31352008)
I think a more reasonable timeframe for this discussion is the release of Python 3 in 2008. That was much more recently, clearly in the multicore era, and a major opportunity to do a breaking change.
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Re:Python Language Summit: Python Without the GIL by eesmith on Thursday May 12, 2022 @07:30AM (#31352420)
There were multiple discussions. The main issue was removing the GIL made single-threaded Python. Experiments in 1999 found single threaded performance was 50% slower - you would need 2 cores just to break even, assuming you had parallel code in the first place.

Here's a 2007 essay by van Rossum on the topic: https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235 .

> I'd welcome it if someone did another experiment along the lines of Greg's patch (which I haven't found online), and I'd welcome a set of patches into Py3k only if the performance for a single-threaded program (and for a multi-threaded but I/O-bound program) does not decrease.

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