cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/970135
GIL or Global Interpreter Lock can be disabled in Python version 3.13. This is currently experimental.
Python 3.13 brings major new features compared to Python 3.12 and one of them is free-threaded mode, which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run more concurrently.
The GIL will be disabled when you configure the Python with the
--disable-gil
option which is nothing but a build configuration (free threading build) at the time of installation.This will allow optionally enabling and disabling GIL using the environment variable
PYTHON_GIL
which can be set to 1 and 0 respectively.It will also provide a command-line option
-X gil
which can also be set to 0 (disable) and 1 (enable).
For multithreaded applications, just don’t use python.
For multithreaded CPU-bound applications, just don’t use pure python, unless the intensive work is done in a compiled module. (Those have always been able to run without the GIL, there are a bunch of them in the standard library and other popular packages, and the API for writing custom ones is pretty good.)
FTFY