Julien Danjou • 1/6/2020

Atomic lock-free counters in Python

This technical article examines the challenges of implementing thread-safe counters in Python. It starts with a naive single-threaded counter, explains why it fails in multi-threaded environments due to non-atomic operations, and then presents a lock-based solution. Finally, it introduces a fast-write, lock-free implementation leveraging CPython's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and itertools.count for high-performance scenarios.

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#Python #concurrency #Threading