[lifthrasiir]

> Removing the GIL sounds like it will make typical Python programs slower and will introduce a lot of complexity?

This was the original reason for CPython to retain GIL for very long time, and probably true for most of that time. That's why the eventual GIL removal had to be paired with other important performance improvements like JIT, which was only implemented after some feasible paths were found and explicitly funded by a big sponsor.

[klranh]

That is the official story. None of it has materialized so far.

[lifthrasiir]

Python development is done in public so you can just benchmark against the development version to see its improvement. In fact, daily benchmarks are already posted to [1]; it indicates around 20% improvement (corresponding to 1.25x in the table) since 3.10. The only thing you can't easily verify is that whether GIL was indeed historically necessary in the past.

[1] https://github.com/faster-cpython/benchmarking-public