[tedmiston]

See Larry Hastings' talk "Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy" from PyCon 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3AyI_u66Bw

As well as his earlier talk "Python's Infamous GIL".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zeHStBowEk

The GIL is a simple design that provides serious benefit to Python (end user) developers.

There are plenty of options for working around this for parallelism, such as the built-in module multiprocessing.

[craigyk]

I liked the talk, but when he talks about the GIL keeping Python "fast" I have to laugh. It's so slow already, who cares? He is talking about a factor of 1.3 to 2X to remove the GIL in a language that is already 30-100X slower than C/C++.