Global Interpreter Lock
A Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is a mutual exclusion lock held by a programming language interpreter thread to avoid sharing code that is not thread-safe with other threads. There is always one GIL for one interpreter process.
Usage of a Global Interpreter Lock in a language effectively limits concurrency of a single interpreter process with multiple threads -- there is no or very little increase in speed when running the process on a multiprocessor machine. Due to signaling with a CPU-bound thread, it can cause a significant slowdown, even on single processors[1].
The reasons of employing such a lock include:
- increased speed of single-threaded programs (no necessity to acquire or release locks on all data structures separately)
- easy integration of C libraries that usually are not thread-safe.
Applications written in languages with a GIL have to use separate processes (i.e. interpreters) to achieve full concurrency, as each interpreter has its own GIL.
Languages that implement a Global Interpreter Lock are, among others:
- Ruby, specifically the MRI Interpeter (where it is called Global VM Lock).
References
- ↑ David Beazley (2009-06-11). "Inside the Python GIL". Chicago: Chicago Python User Group. http://www.dabeaz.com/python/GIL.pdf. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
- ↑ Shannon -jj Behrens (2008-02-03). "Concurrency and Python". Dr. Dobb's Journal. p. 2. http://www.ddj.com/linux-open-source/206103078?pgno=2. Retrieved 2008-07-12. "The GIL is a lock that is used to protect all the critical sections in Python. Hence, even if you have multiple CPUs, only one thread may be doing "pythony" things at a time."
- ↑ Python/C API Reference Manual: Thread State and the Global Interpreter Lock
See also
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