First, there is a solid argument to be made that if you need the performance of multi-threading, you shouldn't be doing it in Python anyway. Second, parallelis

First, there is a solid argument to be made that if you need the performance of multi-threading, you shouldn't be doing it in Python anyway. Second, parallelism in Python is not hindered beyond threading (e.g. multi-processing works just fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVBLF0ohcrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVBLF0ohcrE). Finally, removing the GIL is not trivial and the other changes to the language that mandated breaking backwards compatibility are pretty worth it (IMO).