Threading in Python

[Andy]

There seems to be a lot of (arguably) radical changes
going on in the Python syntax/grammar/language, perhaps
the direction should be towards improving the internals
first?

One thing Java has which Python lacks is transparent
support for multi-cpu threading.  Python has threads,
but I believe it is internally implemented and has
been shown not to take advantage of an SMP machine.

In Java otoh, when you use threads on an SMP machine,
it automatically takes advantage of multiple CPUs
(like BeOS).  This simple plasma benchmark applet

http://rsb.info.nih.gov/plasma/

ran around 1.8x faster on my dual-Celeron machine
and the code was not even designed specially for
multiple CPUs in mind.