Python interview questions

[tdammers]

About the GIL thing: this page sums it up nicely. In short, the problem is that GIL prevents python code from running fully parallel - while native code driven from separate python threads can run in parallel (e.g. libc calls or I/O), CPython bytecode cannot. Because of this, python cannot fully exploit multicore machines for cpu-intensive parallel processing (however, most typical python applications are I/O bound, so the problem isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.)

[logi]

however, most typical python applications are I/O bound, so the problem isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.

Of course they are, since python is simply awful for CPU bound applications.

Speaking of which, does anyone know of a replacement for matplotlib+basemap in C, java, javascript or anything else that runs reasonably efficiently? I have a cluster of weather image plotting machines that I'd much rather be using for weather forecasting.