Are lists thread-safe?
I notice that it is often suggested to use queues with multiple threads, instead of lists and .pop(). Is this because lists are not thread-safe, or for some other reason?
Answer
Lists themselves are thread-safe. In CPython the GIL protects against concurrent accesses to them, and other implementations take care to use a fine-grained lock or a synchronized datatype for their list implementations. However, while lists themselves can't go corrupt by attempts to concurrently access, the lists's data is not protected. For example:
L[0] += 1
is not guaranteed to actually increase L[0] by one if another thread does the same thing, because += is not an atomic operation. (Very, very few operations in Python are actually atomic, because most of them can cause arbitrary Python code to be called.) You should use Queues because if you just use an unprotected list, you may get or delete the wrong item because of race conditions.