GIL often appears as a scary, obscure gizmo. Misunderstanding this aspect of Python may lead to suboptimal architectural choices. I invite you to see my attempt at explaining the GIL and its implications, as well as providing pointers for how to deal with the GIL in specific situations.

There have been (and still are), of course, attempts to get around the GIL - or get rid of it altogether. I hope to give some light to these works.

By providing a comprehensive overview of today’s GIL in CPython, this presentation aims to help make better design choices - be it choosing a concurrency/parallelism model, Python implementation to use - or even whether or not to drop. Python entirely.