ESR "Waning of Python" post

[Skip Montanaro]

I sort of skimmed ESR's post, and sort of skimmed this thread, so
obviously I'm totally qualified to offer my observations on the post
and follow ups. :-)

Eric makes a mistake, in my opinion, confusing his particular
application with the mainstream, when in fact it seems pretty
specialized to me. Consequently, he foresees the waning of Python, in
my opinion, incorrectly.

As to the problems posed by the GIL, I am aware of serious attempts to
remove it at least as far back as Python ~ 1.4 (by Greg Smith, as I
recall). His experience was what has been reported in this thread.
While he could improve CPU utilization for multi-threaded
applications, that came at an unacceptable performance cost for
single-threaded applications, which I believe still dominate the
application landscape today. Beyond performance, there is the issue
that the GIL keeps extension authors from shooting themselves in the
foot. When your code is called, the GIL insures that nobody else can
stomp on your data when you are executing.

Skip Montanaro