GeezerVison

This makes array.array safe to share between threads in the free-threaded build, without the slowdown that caused the earlier gh-128943 change to be reverted (75f38af, scimark regressions).

It is based on gh-130771 by Tomasz Pytel (tom-pytel), who did the bulk of the design, and supersedes it. He is listed as co-author.

Approach

• Same design as list. The layout of the array object is unchanged. In the free-threaded build the capacity is also stored in a header in front of the items. Once the array is shared between threads, old buffers are freed with QSBR (_PyMem_FreeDelayed, now exported for the module).
• All mutating and multi-item methods run in the object's critical section; methods on two arrays lock both.
• len(), a[i], a[i] = x and iteration stay lock-free. A lock-free access loads ob_item, then ob_size, and then checks that ob_item is unchanged, so the size it uses belongs to the buffer it uses. It falls back to the locked path otherwise.

Memory ordering

• The length uses release stores and acquire loads, and items use acquire loads and release stores. A reader that observes a larger length also observes the new items, because growing operations write the items before publishing the length.
• 1- and 2-byte items use a relaxed access plus an acquire or release fence, since pyatomic.h has no 8/16-bit acquire/release operations. 16-byte 'Zd' items are accessed as two 8-byte halves and can tear.
• Bulk copies use per-item atomic accesses unless the array is owned by the current thread and not shared, so there are no data races with lock-free readers. TSan is clean.

Changes relative to gh-130771

• The object layout stays as it is on main (ob_item, allocated), instead of a pointer to a header. Cython's cpython.array support mirrors this struct and manages ob_item itself, so the default build stays compatible. Item buffers also keep their 16-byte alignment.
• The lock-free paths re-check ob_item after loading the size. With a stale size a reader could index a new buffer before its items were written and return uninitialized memory.
• In the lock-free a[i] = x path, the value is converted before the buffer is loaded. Before, __index__/__float__ ran after the load and could let QSBR free the buffer before the store. The per-type setitem functions became pack functions that convert into a local buffer, so append()/insert() also convert only once.
• Release/acquire on the length and items instead of relaxed and plain accesses.
• Items are written before a larger length is published (append, extend, frombytes, fromlist, fromunicode, *=, slice assignment).
• a[i] no longer reports a failed item conversion as IndexError, and PySequence_DelItem() raises IndexError for a bad index again.
• tofile() rechecks the size after each write() call; it could read out of bounds if write() shrank the array (also with the GIL).
• __reduce_ex__ initializes its cached reconstructor with a compare-and-swap.
• The free-threading tests are in test_free_threading/test_array.py and run under TSan.

Known limitation

A lock-free a[i] = x that races with an operation that resizes or rearranges the same array can be lost; for a resize the store can land in the old buffer after it was copied. This is accepted to keep item stores lock-free; there is no crash and no corruption. It is documented in the new "Thread safety" section of the array docs, together with 'Zd' tearing.

Performance

pyperformance scimark (x86-64): no slowdown; geomean 1.01x faster in the default build and 1.03x faster in the free-threaded build.

Microbenchmarks (x86-64, 1M items):

• Default build: a[i], a[i] = x and iteration are within 3% of main; append() is about 30% faster because the value is converted once.
• Free-threaded build: a[i] and a[i] = x are 3-7% faster than main, append() is about 20% faster, iteration is about 30% slower because of the lock-free checks, and array('d', list) is about 9% slower. Bulk copies of a 'B' array that is shared between threads use per-item atomics and are 1.5-4x slower than memcpy; arrays used by one thread are not affected.

Note: creation of this PR was assisted by an LLM

• Issue: Python array module is not free-thread safe. #128942