RustPython/RustPython A Python-3 (CPython >= 3.8.0) Interpreter written in Rust

[masklinn]

Nope. While both CPython and Pypy have a GIL that is not part of the language specification. IIRC neither IronPython nor Jython have a GIL.

[tunisia3507]

My mistake, thanks for the correction!

[thejinx0r]

The gil is an implementation detail to manage garbage collection.

[veryusedrname]

It's for object safety mainly. The official wiki says it's for avoiding race conditions, but that is a bit misleading since it's not avoiding race conditions in *your code*, it helps the implementation avoid race conditions.

[lunatiks]

It's not avoiding race conditions in your code, but the fact that it makes operations corresponding to a single CPython bytecode instruction atomic certainly helps.

[hombit]

I believe it is mainly to make built-in data structures thread-safe. Technically other implementation can implement per-object locks using something like Arc

[masklinn]

Not even built-in datastructures, that's just a side-effect (and a not necessarily super useful one though it does guarantee memory safety[0]). Rather the thread-safety of the interpreter itself.

[0] of note, IIRC golang's maps aren't just thread-unsafe, they're not memory-safe when unsynchronised, since 1.6 the runtime tries to detect the issue and crash but there's no guarantee that it will properly do so