[the5avage]

Is this implemented with lockless programming? Is it a reason for the performance drop in single thread code?

Does it eliminate the need for a GC pause completely?

[nas]

You should probably just read the PEP, which explains these things:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0703/#reference-counting

If by GC you mean the cyclic GC, free-threaded Python currently stops all threads while the cyclic GC is running.

[the5avage]

Thank you:)