Unladen swallow: accelerating Python

It will be interesting to see how much compatibility they maintain as they move forward with trying to remove the global interpreter lock.

There are many C extensions that depend on the GIL for safe operation. Borrowing references, using it to synchronise access to their own state, etc. Much of the C API is written such that it requires the GIL to be used safely too.

I do think that removing the GIL is a worthy goal if they can achieve it without significant performance decrease, but it is one area where it will be difficult to keep compatibility.