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>Every Python developer has heard about the GIL

Sadly, that is not the world we live in.

I've cleaned up dozens of applications written by people with flawed understandings of threads, multiprocessing, and asyncio. I don't even blame the developers for this; it's a glaring language design problem.

If you need parallelism, Python is not the language you should reach for. Nobody ever takes my word for it until it's release day and the product is a broken pile of spaghetti code.



How do you feel about the GIL free option coming in Python 3.13?


It looks like it will be some time before free-threading can be safely used in production. I don't want to have to worry about whether the underlying C code supports no-GIL mode, or trade off single-threaded performance. [0]

Maybe someday this will make parallelism in Python at least as sane as other languages, but in the meantime, I still want to use a compiled language any time performance matters and wait for the kinks in no-GIL to be ironed out.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3.13/whatsnew/3.13.html#free-threade...


Same. I "inherited" an app doing crazy slow sync IO from their "async" functions... Sure, there was often some async IO mixed in, too, but what's the point?




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