nogil VS PHPT

This might be a dumb question, but why would removing the GIL break FFI? Is it just that existing no-GIL implementations/proposals have discarded/ignored it, or is there a fundamental requirement, e.g. C programs unavoidably interact directly with the GIL? I know that the C-API is only stable between minor releases [0] compiled in the same manner [1], so it's not like the ecosystem is dependent upon it never changing.

I cannot seem to find much discussion about this. I have found a no-GIL interpreter that works with numpy, scikit, etc. [2][3] so it doesn't seem to be a hard limit. (That said, it was not stated if that particular no-GIL implementation requires specially built versions of C-API libs or if it's a drop-in replacement.)

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html#c-api-stability

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html#platform-conside...

[2]: https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

[3]: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-703-making-the-global-inter...

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil does manage to get rid of the GIL, but it's not certain to make it into Python core. The main problem is the amount of existing libraries that depend on the existence of the GIL without realizing it - breaking those would be extremely disruptive.

CPython is also investigating the removal of the GIL (PEP703, nogil). I think requiring the GIL is a wider thing that libraries will need to address anyway. But also, for the same reason as above I'd be surprised if the Modular team thought that saying "you can run all your python code unchanged" was a good idea if there was a secret "except for code that uses numpy" muttered under the breath.

I'm worried about the speedup

My understanding is that it's based on the most recent attempt to remove the GIL by Sam Gross

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

In addition to some ways to try to not have nogil have as much overhead he added a lot of unrelated speed improvements so that python without the gil would still be faster not slower in single thread mode. They seem to have merged those performance patches first that means if they add his Gil removal patches in say python 3.12 it will still be substantially slower then 3.11 although faster then 3.10. I hope that doesn't stop them from removing the gil (at least by default)

Looks like it's still active to me:

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil/

In our latest story we show a couple of smart ways to get around some import conflicts in PHP.

The values [0, 15] represent 16 possible values, which is a power of 2.

The correct way to get an unbiased distribution from a sample of 2^x to a modulo that is not an even power of 2 is to use rejection sampling.

This is what RFC 6979 says to do https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6979#section-3.2

But you can also see this technique in CSPRNG code; i.e. https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/d40726670fd2915dcd807673...

I am running this code on MacOS on Apple Silicon hardware which is crashing when using the JIT in a ZTS build of PHP, so the 1m 35s result is without JIT, it might be even faster if I could use it

49. PHP - $58,899

A little about me; I'm a web developer and have been for around 5 years, though I'd dabbled for years. I have experience with Perl and PHP but my day to day is JavaScript/TypeScript be it through NodeJS or ReactJS. I want to learn Rust for no specific reason other than it's fun to learn new things.

Consider a web application where requests are handled through NGINX as the web server and PHP as the dynamic backend language. Let’s say something in the application logic results in a fatal error or process termination. This doesn’t affect NGINX’s ability to serve a response to the client, which would most likely be an HTTP 503 - Service Unavailable message.

In the beginning, I used a technology called CGI to develop server applications written in Perl. This technology was later replaced by Microsoft’s ASP (Active Server Pages) and then PHP. PHP, which you may already know, is still powering over 77% of all the websites as of the time of writing (ever heard of WordPress?).

PHP

As Shopware is mostly based on the Symfony framework, which is in turn based on the PHP language, we should also consider learning about the basics, which will also be useful for other frameworks apart from Shopware, like Symfonycasts, symfony.com, php.net.