What is GIL? It is a mechanism used by the CPython interpreter to ensure that only one thread executes the Python bytecode at a time. Python 3.13 brin

GIL Become Optional in Python 3.13

submited by

Style Pass

2024-08-12 05:30:04

What is GIL? It is a mechanism used by the CPython interpreter to ensure that only one thread executes the Python bytecode at a time.

Python 3.13 brings major new features compared to Python 3.12 and one of them is free-threaded mode, which disables the Global Interpreter Lock, allowing threads to run more concurrently.

At the time of installation, check the option “free threaded binaries(experimental)” to get the feature in Python.

The GIL will be disabled when you configure the Python with the --disable-gil option which is nothing but a build configuration (free threading build) at the time of installation.

This will allow optionally enabling and disabling GIL using the environment variable PYTHON_GIL which can be set to 1 and 0 respectively.

We can also check if the current interpreter is configured with the free threading build (--disable-gil) by using the following code.