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Comment by frfl | Hacker News Reader

If I remember Guido van Rossum did mention the status of the GIL in one of the Lex Friedman episodes [1] he was on (it's been a while, so I may be misremembering). Surprised to see a big decision like this happen so quickly. Did Meta's announcement play a big role in this [2]?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DVyjdw4t9I

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36643670

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Anaconda also has committed engineering resources to assist with the no-GIL transition.

It sure did. Also the decision was pretty much rushed through, if you follow the latest discussion (which got shut down on the notion that everything has been said and trust the SC and coredevs).

https://discuss.python.org/t/a-fast-free-threading-python/27...

Removing him as BDFL was probably the best thing to have happened to Python. He never prioritized performance as a top priority, at least not the same way Lua, JavaScript and Java did. Even Ruby has a JIT now.

You know that people change their minds and now Guido is working as part of a team at Microsoft that is literally called "Faster CPython"?

> Removing him as BDFL was probably the best thing to have happened to Python. He never prioritized performance as a top priority

That doesn't follow; you're assuming that Python should prioritize performance as a top priority, which is very much not a given. Python has always excelled at being easy to use, being flexible, being a great glue language - but performant? An interpreted, dynamically typed language? That's like making a C interpreter - you can do it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

> An interpreted, dynamically typed language? That's like making a C interpreter - you can do it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

And yet despite your complaints, JavaScript, Lua and Julia continue to rise in popularity.

I never said anything about popularity - Python is easily one of the most popular languages. But speed has never been its goal or strong point.

Python had JIT for long, it's called PyPy, One of the most ambitious project ever happened to opensource

His leadership & decision arbitration is dearly missing. Now we have decide by committee and as a result we see Python being pushed and pulled in all directions.

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