Sandra> However, I don't expect that the GIL can be safely removed from Sandra> CPython.
It was removed at one point in the dim, dark past (circa Python 1.4) on an experimental basis. Aside from the huge amount of work, it resulted in significantly lower performance for single-threaded apps (that is, the common case). Maybe more effort should have been put in at that time to improve performance, but that didn't happen. Much more water has gone under the bridge at this point, so extracting the GIL from the core would be correspondingly more difficult. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list