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Enhance no GIL / free threaded support

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start with Python's free-threading documentation and the existing methods marked nogil. Investigate whether Cython can mark the module as free-threaded and whether the binding truly requires the GIL. Done means the module supports free-threaded builds safely, with the relevant tests and documentation updated.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

CPython now has free-threaded builds since 3.13: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/free-threading-python.html

In https://github.com/openzim/python-libzim/pull/237 (to be released as 3.8.0), we've fixed tests and documentation regarding the fact that python-libzim requires the GIL ATM.

We need to investigate if we really need the GIL, because multiple methods are already marked as nogil, especially important ones around the creation of the ZIM (where we do expect the python-libzim user to handle thread-safety when required).

Aim would be to mark the module as free-threaded. I don't know yet how to do this with Cython (if possible at all).

Dominant language
Python
Stars
109
Forks
29
Avg merge
9d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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