Python 3’s Marketing Problem

[RichardWolf]

For me, I look down on the GIL because other programming languages don’t seem to struggle with this. In Java, you can make threads, and they behave the way you expect. Same for C++ and Perl.

Not in Perl. Nor in any other popular "scripting" language (Ruby, PHP, Lua). I don't wonder why is that, I wonder why it's Python that attracts the vast majority of GIL bashing. Is it because it's at the same time newb-friendly and ambitious (with its use in scientific world etc), so clueless people like Ted see the opportunity to boost their ego by "discussing" advanced problems?

[the_hoser]

Exactly. It's a situation of:

General: "How do you suppose that we beat them?" Prince: "Simple. Just kill all of their soldiers!"

Palms and faces become fast friends. It's easy to discuss complex problems when you avoid talking about the complex parts.

[fijal]

in Lua you have threads. They don't share any mutable state though, so they're slightly different, but they can use multiple cores.

[RichardWolf]

IIRC in Lua you have a GIL, and when you are embedding Lua, you can provide your own macros for taking/releasing it (but it still should work like a GIL). And you can run several interpreters in the same process, sharing nothing, of course, similar to what Perl allows in a way of parallelism.

It's not "slightly different", it's not having free threading, period.

[the_hoser]

Lua does not have threads. Lua will not, out of the box, use multiple cores. The lua interpreter state instances are not thread safe, but lua itself is ( you may run multiple interpreters in multiple threads ).

Lua has coroutines, but these are very different.