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The first year of free-threaded Python

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Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#3

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

I was thinking that too. I am really not a professional developer though.

OFC it would be nice to just write python and everything would be 12x accelerated, but i don't see how there would not be any draw-backs that would interfere with what makes python so approachable.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#4

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

I hope at least the option remains to enable the GIL, because I don't trust me to write thread-safe code on the first few attempts.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#5

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

how does the the language being dynamic negatively affect the complexity of multithreading?

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#6

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

GIL or no-GIL concerns only people who want to run multicore workloads. If you are not already spending time threading or multiprocessing your code there is practically no change. Most race condition issues which you need to think are there regardless of GIL.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#7

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

I don't want to add more to your fears, but also remember that LLMs have been trained on decades worth of Python code that assumes the presence of the GIL.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#8

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

As a Python dabbler, what should I be reading to ensure my multi-threaded code in Python is in fact safe.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#9
post #5

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

how does the the language being dynamic negatively affect the complexity of multithreading?

Is there so much legacy python multithreaded code anyway?

Considering everyone knew about the GIL, I'm thinking most people just wouldn't bother.

Re: The first year of free-threaded Python

#10

Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.

More realistically, as it happened in ML/AI scene, the knowledgeable people will write the complex libraries and will hand these down to scientists and other less experienced, or risk-averse developers (which is not a bad thing).

With the critical mass Python acquired over the years, GIL becomes a very sore bottleneck in some cases. This is why I decided to learn Go, for example. Properly threaded (and green threaded) programming language which is higher level than C/C++, but lower than Python which allows me to do things which I can't do with Python. Compilation is another reason, but it was secondary with respect to threading.

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