Software Transactional Memory with PyPy
PyPy is a fast alternative Python implementation. Software Transactional Memory is a current academic research topic. Put the two together --brew for a couple of years-- and we get a version of PyPy that runs on multiple cores, without the infamous Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). It has been freshly released in beta, including integration with the Just-in-Time compiler.
But its point is not only of being "GIL-less": it can also give the illusion of single-threaded programming. I will give examples of what exactly I mean by that. Starting from the usual explicitly multithreaded demos, I will move to other examples where the actual threads are hidden from the programmer. I will explain how the core of async libraries (Twisted, Tornado, gevent, ...) can be modified to use multiples threads, without exposing any concurrency issues to the user of the library --- existing Twisted/etc. programs still run correctly without change. (They may need a few small changes to enable parallelism.)
I will also give an overview of how things work under the cover: the 10000-feet view is to internally create copies of objects and write changes into these copies. This allows the originals to continue being used by other threads.
