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I'm relatively new to threading and asynchronous programming in general, but I'm trying to understand the distinction between the two as it relates to the GIL in CPython.

From the reading that I've down, I understand that threads have their own stack and the two models are a different programming paradigm. But given that they cannot run concurrently because of the GIL, are python threads a type of asynchronous execution underneath? I'd really like to get a better understanding of how the python interpreter implements threading, specifically how it determines when one thread is blocking and another can be executed?

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  • Maybe this SO question could be of help? Commented Apr 8, 2013 at 10:31

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The GIL does only play a role when executing python code - calling Functions that are implemented in C, for example, GIL shouldn't interfere afaik. Also, downloading files or moving files from the disk can be made work concurrently with python Threads.

Quote from the Python Wiki:

Note that potentially blocking or long-running operations, such as I/O, image processing, and NumPy number crunching, happen outside the GIL. Therefore it is only in multithreaded programs that spend a lot of time inside the GIL, interpreting CPython bytecode, that the GIL becomes a bottleneck.

You might have a look on the multiprocessing module, which allows you to overcome the GIL and use multiple Cores on the machine. Also, there is work going on to make PyPy, an alternative Python Interpreter, become GIL-less in some day (just search for STM/AME).

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