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. In languages with a GIL, there is always one GIL for each interpreter process. CPython and CRuby use GILs.
Applications written in programming languages with a GIL can be designed to use separate processes to achieve full parallelism, as each process has its own interpreter and in turn has its own GIL. Otherwise, the GIL can be a significant barrier to parallelism—a price paid for having the dynamism of the language.
Read more about Global Interpreter Lock: Benefits and Drawbacks, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words global, interpreter and/or lock:
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“The best interpreter of the law is custom.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)