Global Interpreter Lock
Explore the concept of the Global Interpreter Lock in Python and understand why it restricts parallel execution of threads. Discover how this design impacts the performance of CPU-bound programs while allowing I/O-bound programs to benefit from multithreading. Gain foundational knowledge of Python's interpreter behavior crucial for mastering concurrency.
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Global Interpreter Lock
In one of the previous sections we discussed I/O and CPU bound programs. In this lesson, we'll understand why only I/O bound Python programs can leverage multithreading to speed up execution time. But first, a quick refresher of how Python works is necessary to understand the acronym GIL or global interpreter lock.
How Python works
Python is an interpreted language, that is, there is no static time compiling as that happens in the case of Java, C or C++. The program that interprets user code is called the Interpreter. ...