ESR "Waning of Python" post

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 4:21 PM Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Paul Rubin wrote [concerning GIL removal]:
> > It's weird that Python's designers were willing to mess up the user
> > language in the 2-to-3 transition but felt that the C API had to be kept
> > sarcosanct.  Huge opportunities were blown at multiple levels.
>
> You say that as though we had a solution for GIL removal all
> thought out and ready to go, and the only thing that stopped us
> is that it would have required changing the C API.
>
> But it's not like that at all. As far as I know, all the
> attempts that have been made so far to remove the GIL have
> led to performance that was less than satisfactory. It's a
> hard problem that we haven't found a good solution to yet.
>

In actual fact, it's not a problem per-se. It's a design choice, and
every alternative choice tried so far has even worse problems. THAT is
why we still have it.

ChrisA