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> even as recently as 2012 the most common advice was "avoid threads and use processes."

Ok, I know in the grand scheme of things this may seem recent, but that was 12 years ago. Has the story really not changed since then?

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Not really, multi-threaded parallelism is still limited by the GIL and it is best to use multiple processes instead. Unless you are using threads for I/O, or anything not using the CPU.

What has changed since then is that Python now supports single-threaded concurrency, through async-await semantics.

Adding threading to a dynamic scripting language that had a multi-decade run as a single-threaded runtime turns out to be really, really difficult, especially if the language had C extensions. They all have had one form or another of very hard time about it, because it is a legitimately difficult problem.

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