[Pyrex] Pyrex and the GIL

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 05:24:18PM +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
> 
> >>That's not right either, because when calling
> >>out to such a function you need to ensure that
> >>the GIL is *not* held.
> 
> >Not really, the PyGILState_Ensure() API doesn't care.
> 
> The uses I have in mind for declaring an external
> function nogil are where the function does something
> that you want done with the GIL released, such as
> reading from a file. The function itself probably
> knows nothing about Python.

That's a different case -- aren't we talking about two seperate cases here:

  1) an external function that we wish to declare doesn't need the GIL to be
     held when a pyrex function calls it.
  2) a pyrex function that may be called when GIL isn't held, but needs it,
     e.g. to be passed as a callback to a C library.

You're talking about case 1, and I'm happy enough with "nogil" for that.  I
think "ensures_gil" would be a saner name for case 2, though -- after all,
I presume it would be implemented using PyGILState_Ensure, which exists for
that purpose.

-Andrew.