[chrisseaton]

This only gives you parallelism in one specific situation though - where operations like '+' and '@' take a long time. If they were fine-grained operations, then this doesn't help you.

If instead of operating on a numerical matrix, you were instead operating on something like a graph of Python objects, something like a graph traversal would be hard to parallelise as you could not stay out of the GIL long enough to get anything done.

[quietbritishjim]

I agree that not quite all situations will be covered by coarse locks like this. But many will, and my original comment was meant to draw attention to those situations. Your previous comment seemed to be saying that everyone already knew about those, but I still believe that some people commenting or reading here weren't aware you could release the GIL with just a numpy call.

I did also concede that if you do have to write your algorithm completely from scratch, with no scope for using existing C extensions (be they general purpose like numpy or more specialist that implements the whole algorithm) then yes you'll be caught be the GIL, so I agree with you on that. But I also made the point that you'll be caught even more (orders of magintude more!) by the slowness of Python, so any discussion about parallelism or the GIL is a red herring. It's like worrying that you car's windscreen will start to melt if you travel at 500mph; even if that's technically true, it's not the problem you should be focusing on.

It's interesting you mention graphs because the most popular liberally licensed graph library is NetworkX, which is indeed pure Python and so presumably isn't particularly fast. There are graph libraries written as C extension modules but I believe they are less popular and less librally licensed (GPL-style rather than BSD-style). So I definitely agree that this is a big weakness of the Python ecosystem.

[galangalalgol]

This is a good point. Fine grained parallelism works well with c extensions, but coarse grained does not. Which is why data science and MATLAB like tasks are so often done in python without worrying too much about the python penalty. But if you have a lot of small dense matrix operations, even VBA in excel will be faster by more than 10x because you keep popping back into python.

[quietbritishjim]

I agree with the idea, but you have fine grained and course grained switched.