Juergen Brendel who commented on my post, about the Global Interpreter Lock, wrote a open letter pleading Guido to consider removing the GIL. Guido gave a seasoned response on his blog today – Anyone willing to do the hard work is free to submit a patch for Py3K AND prove that it does not affect single threaded performance. A fair call on Guido’s part and very generous of him to respond to yet-another-rant-about-the-GIL.
The Gods of Python sound highly pessimistic about the possibility of a GIL-less CPython in the near future. But I am deciding to continue with Python and for code where I am forced to use threads, I will have to switch to writing extension modules in C. In this sense, writing high performance threaded code in Python is really not as easy as writing it in Java. Forget high-performance, even doing GTK programming is cumbersome – you need to be aware of the GTK’s threading intricacies. Twisted Python and Parallel Python are definitely things I am going to look at more deeply now.
About seven years ago when I joined college, I figured out that BASIC was not the greatest invention of mankind. Today it feels like Deja Vu ! One of these days, I am going to be tempted into designing The-Ultimate-Programming-Language
Filed under: Programming, Python, Rants
interesting