Notes from the Meeting on Python GIL Removal Between Python Core and Sam Gross

During the annual Python core development sprint we held a meeting with Sam Gross, the author of nogil, a fork of Python 3.9 that removes the GIL. This is a non-linear summary of the meeting. Sam's work demonstrates it's viable to remove the GIL in such a way that the resulting Python interpreter is performant and scales with added CPU cores. Don't expect Python 3.11 to drop the GIL just yet. Core developers don't actively plan to release Python 4 at this point, in fact the opposite is true: we are actively trying not to release Python 4 since the Python 2 to 3 transition was hard enough for the community. In other words, Python 3.9 with all the other changes but the GIL removal itself could be 19% faster. Q: What do you think of running multiple Python interpreters in parallel with one GIL per interpreter? Function calls in Python 3.9 are much cheaper than they were in Python 3.5.