The first year of free-threaded Python

> Instead, many reach for multiprocessing, but spawning processes is expensive

Agreed.

> and communicating across processes often requires making expensive copies of data

SharedMemory [0] exists. Never understood why this isn’t used more frequently. There’s even a ShareableList which does exactly what it sounds like, and is awesome.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.shared_mem...

Yeah I've had great success sharing numpy arrays this way. Explicit sharing is not a huge burden, especially when compared with the difficulty of debugging problems that occur when you accidentally share things between threads. People vastly overstate the benefit of threads over multiprocessing and I don't look forward to all the random segfaults I'm going to have to debug after people start routinely disabling the GIL in a library ecosystem that isn't ready.

I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.

> I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.

Nobody sane tries to do math in JS. Backend JS is recommended for situations where processing is minimal and it is mostly lots of tiny IO requests that need to be shunted around.

I'm a huge JS/Node proponent and if someone says they need to write a backend service that crunches a lot of numbers, I'll recommend choosing a different technology!

For some reason Python peeps keep trying to do actual computations in Python...