[pganssle]

> I can't help but read all the interjections from the core developers as a strong indication of why all these sorts of things tend to fail on the vine.

I think this might be a misunderstanding of the nature of the event that these notes are generated from, unless I'm misunderstanding your objection. The point of this Q&A as I saw it was to explore the feasibility of the idea and fully flesh out the costs and benefits so that we can make informed decisions about how to proceed.

The "random interjections" are notes of caution about what trade-offs need to be made. For example, it is very easy to overlook "dark matter" code because we don't have access to it, but it's almost certainly the majority of Python code out there. It is also not a complete deal-breaker to say that some change could break unknown proprietary extensions — otherwise we'd never be able to change anything; the key is that the changes have to be worth it. A lot of that depends on details — if it's easy to update C extensions for nogil mode (even if they were designed without parallelism in mind), then making breaking changes to remove the GIL might not be so bad. If nogil mode requires that most C extensions totally overhaul their reference counting and C API usage and the changes require restructuring code rather than something that can be done with automated search and replace, that's a much bigger cost and will probably come with a long term fork of the ecosystem (which is a huge pain to deal with) and it might not be worth it.

Avoiding this sort of criticism will not make the underlying problems go away, and I think everyone involved understood that this meeting was intended to bring to light any objections that might guide the work towards ultimate resolution.