What I'm saying is that not only does Python not have superb performance, its performance is actually largely irrelevant. The advantage of Python is in ease of

What I'm saying is that not only does Python not have superb performance, its performance is actually largely irrelevant. The advantage of Python is in ease of use, capabilities as glue language, readability, etc. So that's why I really don't see why you wouldn't remove the GIL at a reasonable slowdown factor (2x was a figure thrown around IIRC). People always proclaim that you can just use multiple processes for parallelism. It's nice when it suits your (embarrassingly parallel) problem but when you need to share a large amount of data between processes it's a major hassle.