From 3.13 GIL can be disabled... but for this we need customly build interpreter from sources. That's the point should be refined.
Cause not every main Linux distro now provide prebuilt packages, only Fedora (
python3.14-freethreading package), OpenSUSE (python314-nogil package), Ubuntu (python3.14-nogil package through external PPA) and Nix (python314FreeThreading package), in Gentoo via own ebuild, or in Arch via own pkgbuild script.This will provide
python3.14t with NoGIL enabled by default, and we can enable GIL with PYTHON_GIL environment variable or the command-line option -X gil for CPython.But... free-threaded CPython build is not thread safe!
Thread safety, i.e. managing shared mutable state for simultaneous threads, using locks, mutexes and other synchronization primitives - are fully on developer. Python code is thread safe. But CLang code (via FFI) and Python interpreter code itself, that written in CLang, can allow access to the same memory, for pointers in several threads, lead to data race and deadlocks. Also can lead to dead/hanging objects in memory and thus memory leaks in long uptimes.
And this will affect run-time and revealed only in run-time.
(While in Rust for example pointers/references are typed and type-safe, thus allocations/deallocations, objects lifetimes tracking, pointers/references to same data and memory regions, are tracked in compile time, via move semantics, which completely prevents dangling pointers.)
Thus memory sanitizers and threads sanitizers should be used for free-threaded CPython. And not all main/core libraries in PyPI now support free-threading.
https://docs.python.org/3/howto/free-threading-python.html
https://py-free-threading.github.io/installing-cpython/
https://py-free-threading.github.io/running-gil-disabled/
https://py-free-threading.github.io/debugging/
https://py-free-threading.github.io/thread_sanitizer/
#Python
#notes
