Removing the GIL is non-trivial. But I'm surprised that they didn't take advantage of Python 3 to move to a more performant register-based interpreter. Severa

Removing the GIL is non-trivial. But I'm surprised that they didn't take advantage of Python 3 to move to a more performant register-based interpreter. Several people expressed interest in building one, and working prototypes were even made, but the core developers didn't seem much interested in performance upgrades. I think their attitude is generally, "if it's performance-critical, write it in C", which was a good approach 15 years ago. However, Python's competition now comes from languages like Go and Rust that have both good performance and are user-friendly and productive (with features such as expressive syntax and a comprehensive standard library).