The Python world has been fractured a few times before. The infamous transition from version 2 to version 3 still affects people today, and there could be a new schism in the future. [Sam Gross] proposed a solution to drop the Global Interrupt Interpreter Lock (GIL), which would have enormous implications for many projects that leverage the CPython internals, such as Pandas and NumPy.
The fact that Python is interpreted is a double edge sword. It means there can be different runtimes, such as Pyston, Cinder, MicroPython, PyPy, and others, that might support the whole language, a specific version, or a subset. But if you’re using Python, you’re probably running CPython. And it has something known as global interpreter lock that affects threaded code. In a nutshell, only one thread can run in the interpreter at a time. There are some ways around it, such as moving performance-critical sections to C or having multiple interpreters. However, most existing solutions come with considerable downsides. Continue reading “Python Ditches The GILs And Comes Ashore”