#346: Have you lost your GIL?

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Brian #1: A Steering Council notice about PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython)

• Thomas Wouters
• Suggested by John Hagen
• “We intend to accept PEP 703, although we’re still working on the acceptance details.”
• Moving forward in 3 stages
  • short-term, no-GIL experimental build in 3.13 or 3.14
  • mid-term, declare support for no-GIL version
  • long-term, no-GIL becomes default and remove any vestiges of the GIL
• No commitment and timeframe is nebuous
• long-term means 5+ years
• Need community support
• “We want to be able to change our mind if it turns out, any time before we make no-GIL the default, that it’s just going to be too disruptive for too little gain.”

Michael #2: Google's post-cookie world could turn into DRM for the internet

• A new authentication system could let websites block extensions or jailbroken devices.
• Google has been trying to implement plans to move beyond cookies for years without denying its partners the means to sell targeted ads.
• One recent proposal to guarantee user privacy and security could come at the cost of freedom of functionality.
• Comments are somewhat interesting.
• More info in a second article.
• Vivaldi has a response here.
• Brave won’t ship with it.

Brian #3: How ruff changed my Python programming habits

• Matthias Kestenholz
• “…there’s always a trade off between development speed (waiting on git commit is very boring) and strictness. “
• “ruff is so fast that enabling additional rules is practically free in terms of speed...”
• ruff has way more rules since last I checked. They are just mostly turned off by default.
• The article suggests a bunch to try turning on.
• See also
  • ruff config settings
    • turn on flake8-bugbear while leaving on defaults with select = ["E", "F", "B"]
  • lots of rules to choose from
  • ruff-pre-commit to run these with pre-commit

Michael #4: pathlib api extended to use fsspec backends

• via Justin Flannery
• Expanding on the capabilities of fsspec, the same GitHub organization also supports another powerful library called universal_pathlib.
• universal_pathlib is a python library that aims to extend Python's built-in pathlib.Path api to use a variety of backend filesystems using fsspec.
• This seamless replacement allows developers to leverage the familiar and powerful pathlib API on any type of filesystem. upath.Path is a drop-in replacement for pathlib.Path and is an excellent addition to your toolkit.

Joke: Understanding pointers