python全局解释器锁_Python全局解释器锁 -- GIL

GIL

Someone from the audience asked about the global interpreter lock (GIL), looking for more insight into the problem and how it is being addressed. Van Rossum asked back with a grin: "How much time have you got?" He gave a brief history of how the GIL came about. Well after Python was born, computers started getting more cores. When threads are running on separate cores, there are race conditions when two or more try to update the same object, especially with respect to the reference counts that are used in Python for garbage collection.

One possible solution would be for each object to have its own lock that would protect its data from multiple access. It turns out, though, that even when there is no contention for the locks, doing all of the locking and unlocking is expensive. Some experiments showed a 2x performance decrease for single-threaded programs that didn't need the locking at all. That means there are only benefits when three or more threads and cores are being used.

So, the GIL was born (though that name came about long after it was added to the interpreter). It is a single lock that effectively locks all objects at once, so that all object accesses are serialized. The problem is that now, 10 or 15 years later, there are multicore processors everywhere and people would like to take advantage of them without having to do multiprocessing (i.e. separate communicating processes rather than threads).

If you were to design a new language today, he said, you would make it without mutable (changeable) objects, or with limited mutability. From the audience, though, came: "That would not be Python." Van Rossum agreed: "You took the words out of my mouth." There are various ongoing efforts to get around the GIL, including the PyPy software transactional memory (STM) work and PyParallel. Other developers are also "banging their head against that wall until it breaks". If anyone has ideas on how to remove the GIL but still keep the language as Python, he (and others) would love to hear about it.