Top all-time · #3091
Dave Beazley
Personal blog · dabeaz.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Dave Beazley writes Dabeaz, a personal blog at dabeaz.blogspot.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “An Inside Look at the (Python) GIL Removal Patch of Lore”. The last post was in 2014, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Dave Beazley's blog as background on Python's GIL and thread performance, citing posts on GIL-removal experiments, threading tests and a Superboard II hack. The links are mostly used as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- An Inside Look at the (Python) GIL Removal Patch of Lore6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-08-12
- The Python GIL Visualized3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-05
- Dabeaz: PyCon 2012 Followup2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-13
- /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-20
What Hacker News says?
>> My use of python is somewhat recent. But the two languages that I have used a lot of - Java and JS - have interpreters that were heavily optimized over time. I wonder why that never happened with python and, instead, everyone continues to write their critical code in C/Rust. Improving Python performance has been a topic as far back as 2008 when I attended my first PyCon. A quick detour on Python 3 because there i…
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate”Submitted Using Python to Encode Cassette Recordings for my Superboard II as a story · 100 points
HN discussionIt's more complicated than that. Specifically having a mix of any CPU and I/O bound threads doesn't play out as nicely: See this: http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/02/revisiting-thread-priorit... Or even better for a demo watch David Beazley's Pycon 2015 video (It is an awesome video even if you don't care about the GIL or socket programming).
Comment linking /2010/02/revisiting-thread-priorities-and-new.html
on “What’s New in Python 3.5”Submitted Write a Compiler in Python - The Experiment Begins as a story · 99 points
HN discussionThe 2nd edition of Python Cookbook doesn't cover Python 2.5. It covers language features that were there till Python 2.4. ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007973 ) The 3rd edition of Python Cookbook is expected to appear by end of this year. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/12/oreilly-python-cookbook-p...
Comment linking /2010/12/oreilly-python-cookbook-python-3-all.html
on “Python and the Principle of Least Astonishment”Submitted An Inside Look at the (Python) GIL Removal Patch of Lore as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI had a personal conversation with Larry Hastings (the presenter) at PyCon. Here are a couple of notes from that chat, phrased neutrally. Some of these points may be reïterated in the linked video: - We can view this work is as a revisiting of Greg Stein's GIL-removal attempt in Python 1.4: http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-remova... It seems wholly reasonable to revisit the approach in light of…
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy [video]”Submitted The Python GIL Visualized as a story · 22 points
HN discussionDavid Beazley did something similar with his Superboard II computer. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-python-to-encode-ca... http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/08/decoding-superboard-ii-ca... http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2010/09/using-telnet-to-access-my... Pretty sweet hack, IMO
Comment linking /2010/09/using-telnet-to-access-my-superboard-ii.html
on “Apple ][ game server”Submitted Dave Beazley: Putting all of my Past PyCon/IPC Presentations on Slideshare as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> I think you misunderstood codedivine. His point was not that applications that use STM and make use of a single thread are slower than sequential implementations of the same application. And the experience has been exactly the same in locks-based GIL-removal tests in Python: David Beazley recently "unearthed" and tested a GIL-removal patch from the 1.4 days[0]... > To test threads, I wrote a small sample that subd…
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “PyPy - We need Software Transactional Memory”Submitted C like, blazing fast python IO as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThey may be fast in C++, but not in the context of CPython. Here are the dirty details. Note that fine-grained locking has also been tried before: https://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-remov...
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “Instrumenting Python GIL with eBPF”Submitted Yieldable Threads (Part 1) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIn short yes. The longer answer is linked in a post above[1] - it describes the problems with Python (CPython), many of which would apply to Ruby (CRuby/MRI) as well. [1] http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-remova...
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “2012: The year Rubyists learned to stop worrying and love threads”Submitted Decoding S'board II Cassette Audio Using Python 3, Two Generators, and a Deque as a story · 4 points
HN discussionalso, people experimented with removing the GIL in python and did not get any benefit from it. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-remova... looks at some of the issues involved.
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “2012: The year Rubyists learned to stop worrying and love threads”- ot · 2012-03-13
Submitted Dabeaz: PyCon 2012 Followup as a story · 3 points
HN discussion sweet, I was wondering when someone was going to mention the GIL, now the fun can start. http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2012/03/pycon-2012-followup.html "In any case, the performance of threads is highly specific to the application at hand. You can't just take some benchmark from one of my GIL talks and extrapolate that out to a general statement about all Python thread programming. Personally, I find that Python thread…
Comment linking /2012/03/pycon-2012-followup.html
on “Pykka - Actors For Python”Submitted Class decorators might also be super as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> You will rewrite your code to not make use of the guarantees. I suppose a problem is that unlike Java, Python is not fast enough to implement low level data structures in the language itself, so you can't easily implement non-thread-safe data structures without losing memory safety at the C level, which is unacceptable. Still, I have the feeling that with heavy use of biased locking, you could stick locks everywhe…
Comment linking /2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html
on “So Pythonistas, you want to get rid of the GIL...”Submitted Yieldable Python Threads as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Just to clarify, the GIL is worse than making writing multithreaded programs harder, it makes CPU bound singlethreaded tasks perform worse on multicore machines than on single core machines. This is incorrect. I'm guessing you're making that claim based on David's discoveries on the old (2.x) GIL last year and didn't actually bother seeing the presentations (or reading the slides, or the blog posts). All the issue…
Comment linking /2010/01/python-gil-visualized.html
on a deleted threadSubmitted The Python GIL Visualized as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding RPython as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Telnet to a Superboard II using Python and the cassette ports as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Python Deadlock Avoidance as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
