[anonacct37]

You might have chosen bad words, but people reading this should know this statement it false. Python has threads. You can create them and (if you're using linux) see them in the /proc filesystem.

A more accurate statement is: "python bytecode can't execute concurrently w/o something like multiprocessing". The key difference? You can do multithreaded I/O all day long, which is a pretty important use case of threading. You can also hand off work to C and release the GIL, although this isn't as common. Example: XML parsing, regex, numeric work.

FWIW all these gotchas are one of the reasons I love just having complete threading support built in to my language.

[chrisseaton]

> A more accurate statement is: "python bytecode can't execute concurrently

No this isn't any more accurate. Python bytecode does execute concurrently if you have multiple threads. It just doesn't execute in parallel.

[ensiferum]

In fact it is quite common. If you look into the c modules you see a pattern where they release the gil before performing some operation and then reacquire it