Python stands to lose its GIL, and gain a lot of speed

As far as I am aware, the big issue with removing the GIL is the vast amount of C based packages that depend on the GIL. Not just internal packages, but a lot of third party ones.

That means removing the GIL would all of a sudden break a lot of code, and require a lot of packages to be rewritten. Inevitably, some will not be rewritten, remain broken, and a schism in Python might form again.

Perhaps Python should try making message passing based concurrency better. It tends to lead to more robust code than shared memory concurrency. I could see how that might be too far a departure from what people expect though.

Big discussion of this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782