[Python-Dev] Threading idea -- exposing a global thread lock

Tue Mar 14 03:57:59 CET 2006

A user on comp.lang.python has twisted himself into knots writing multi-threaded 
code that avoids locks and queues but fails when running code with non-atomic 
access to a shared resource. While his specific design is somewhat flawed, it 
does suggest that we could offer an easy way to make a block of code atomic 
without the complexity of other synchronization tools:
 gil.acquire()
 try:
 #do some transaction that needs to be atomic
 finally:
 gil.release()
The idea is to temporarily suspend thread switches (either using the GIL or a 
global variable in the eval-loop). Think of it as "non-cooperative" 
multi-threading. While this is a somewhat rough approach, it is dramatically 
simpler than the alternatives (i.e. wrapping locks around every access to a 
resource or feeding all resource requests to a separate thread via a Queue).
While I haven't tried it yet, I think the implementation is likely to be 
trivial.
FWIW, the new with-statement makes the above fragment even more readable:
 with atomic_transaction():
 # do a series of steps without interruption
Raymond