Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By : Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis
Book Image

Advanced Python Programming

By: Dr. Gabriele Lanaro, Quan Nguyen, Sakis Kasampalis

Overview of this book

This Learning Path shows you how to leverage the power of both native and third-party Python libraries for building robust and responsive applications. You will learn about profilers and reactive programming, concurrency and parallelism, as well as tools for making your apps quick and efficient. You will discover how to write code for parallel architectures using TensorFlow and Theano, and use a cluster of computers for large-scale computations using technologies such as Dask and PySpark. With the knowledge of how Python design patterns work, you will be able to clone objects, secure interfaces, dynamically choose algorithms, and accomplish much more in high performance computing. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the skills and confidence to build engaging models that quickly offer efficient solutions to your problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Python High Performance - Second Edition by Gabriele Lanaro • Mastering Concurrency in Python by Quan Nguyen • Mastering Python Design Patterns by Sakis Kasampalis
Table of Contents (41 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

An introduction to the Global Interpreter Lock


The GIL is quite popular in the Python concurrent programming community. Designed as a lock that will only allow one thread to access and control the Python interpreter at any given time, the GIL in Python is often known as the infamous GIL that prevents multithreaded programs from reaching their fully optimized speed. In this section, we will discuss the concept behind the GIL, and its goals: why it was designed and implemented, and how it affected multithreaded programming in Python.

An analysis of memory management in Python

Before we jump into the specifics of the GIL and its effects, let's consider the problems that Python core developers encountered during the early days of Python, and that gave rise to a need for the GIL. Specifically, there is a significant difference between Python programming and programming in other popular languages, in terms of managing objects in the memory space.

For example, in the programming language C++, a variable...