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This is a post that popped up this AM for me — “An open let­ter to Guido van Rossum: Mr Rossum, tear down that GIL!”. It’s an inter­est­ing read if noth­ing for the fact that the GIL is the biggest piece of cane with which peo­ple beat python with (I don’t count sig­nif­i­cant white­space whin­ing). Take a peek at that, and then read the red­dit dis­cus­sion.

I’ve been writ­ing a piece on the GIL off and on for a few weeks now — col­lect­ing dis­cus­sions and infor­ma­tion and try­ing to piece together the most cog­nizant series of thoughts I could muster.

The inter­est­ing thing is that the GIL was also one of the point Bruce Eckel touched on in his recent “Python 3K or Python 2.9?” post on the 8th — be sure to read the com­ments there too.

I’ve col­lected about 30 or so GIL/Concurrency related tid­bits I’ll put together in a piece, but I am inter­ested in hear­ing other opin­ions about the GIL before I reveal my par­tic­u­lar horse in this race.

Call me wierd — but thread­ing itself is a bit of a beast in my eyes: it could be because I’ve never built a giant UI appli­ca­tion, or I am used to talk­ing amongst machines rather than cores on a sin­gle machine. It seems(?) bet­ter to plan to scale across nodes in a clus­ter rather than proces­sors on the machine. Cod­ing to the for­mer begets the lat­ter, no? Note that I do use thread­ing — quite fre­qently I might add.

Update: Michael Tsai weighs in on the “open letter”.

Update Part 2: Guido’s posted a response to the open let­ter. I think this clar­i­fies the BDFL’s posi­tion as one of “give me some­thing and we’ll see”. ( And the red­dit dis­cus­sion now )

This is a post that popped up this AM for me - "An open letter to Guido van Rossum: Mr Rossum, tear down that GIL!". It's an interesting read if nothing for the fact that the GIL is the biggest piece of cane with which people beat python with (I don't count significant whitespace ...