We occasionally received reports from people getting "invalid tstate"
crashes (this is a fatal error in PyThreadState_Delete()). Finally
several people were able to reproduce it reliably and Tim Peters
discovered that there is a race condition when multiple threads are
calling this function without holding the global interpreter lock (the
function may be called without holding that).
Solved the race condition by adding a lock around the mutating uses of
interp->tstate_head. Tim and Jonathan Giddy have run tests that make
it likely that this fixes the crashes -- although Tim hasn't heard
from the person who reported the original problem.
PyThreadState_GetDict() returns a dictionary that can be used to hold such
state; the caller should pick a unique key and store its state there. If
PyThreadState_GetDict() returns NULL, an exception has been raised (most
likely MemoryError) and the caller should pass on the exception. */
PyObject *
PyThreadState_GetDict()
Guido van Rossum