Hi,
I know the Global Interpreter Lock ensures that only one python thread
has access to the interpreter at a time, which prevents a lot of
situations where one thread might step on another's toes.
But I'd like to ask about a specific situation just to be sure I
understand things relative to some code I'm writing.
I've got a dictionary which is accessed by several threads at the same
time (that is, to the extent that the GIL allows). The thing is,
however, no two threads will ever be accessing the same dictionary
items at the same time. In fact the thread's ID from thread.get_ident()
is the key to the dictionary; a thread only modifies items
corresponding to its own thread ID. A thread will be adding an item
with its ID when it's created, and deleting it before it exits, and
modifying the item's value in the meantime.
As far as I can tell, if the Python bytecodes that cause dictionary
modifications are atomic, then there should be no problem. But I don't
know that they are because I haven't looked at the bytecodes.
Any feedback on this would be appreciated. For various reasons, we're
still using Python 2.3 for the time being.
Gary
--
Gary Robinson
CTO
Emergent Music, LLC
gr*******@goombah.com
207-942-3463
Company: http://www.goombah.com
Blog: http://www.garyrobinson.net
