Re:What's up, Python? The GIL removed, a new compiler, optpa...
by fbdab103 on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:57PM
(#36936428)
It was correctly written to the invariant promises of the platform at the time. If Python is altering the deal, that does not suddenly make the library writer at fault.
Re:What's up, Python? The GIL removed, a new compiler, optpa...
by oivey on Sunday July 30, 2023 @06:19PM
(#36936585)
There seems to be some confusion here. The GIL is not an invariant of Python that makes your code thread safe. Python is not altering the deal. You can still use threads to write concurrent code in Python today, and you'll still run into all of the classic concurrency related bugs.
People just mostly don't bother writing threaded code in Python today because it provides no performance benefit. That may change, and it very likely will expose many threading bugs that already exist in many libraries that just have never been found.
Re:What's up, Python? The GIL removed, a new compiler, optpa...
by dpedu on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:07PM
(#36937418)
You're right, the GIL certainly doesn't automatically make all code thread-safe. However, it does make some operations that would normally be problematic in a multithreaded context thread-safe. Such as: appending to a list, updating a dict, modifying object attributes, and others.
https://docs.python.org/3/faq/library.html#what-kinds-of-glo...
Re:What's up, Python? The GIL removed, a new compiler, optpa...
by angus_gh on Sunday July 30, 2023 @09:24PM
(#36937875)
The no-gil fork of Python makes the builtin collections thread-safe, so that will remain not an issue (see the "Collection thread-safety" section of the design doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/18CXhDb1ygxg-YXNBJNzfzZsD... )
Re:What's up, Python? The GIL removed, a new compiler, optpa...
by umanwizard on Sunday July 30, 2023 @08:50PM
(#36937703)
Why do you say code relying on the GIL is incorrect? The GIL is a documented part of Python.
I'd phrase this differently: Writing correct multithreaded code will be just as challenging (or not, depending on the person and their comfort with concurrent and parallel code development) as before, but now you won't be able to get away with sloppy multithreaded code that relied on the GIL to not break.