Hastings proposed avoiding the breaking changes issues by having separate extension integration points for python with the GIL and without. In other words, cpy

Hastings proposed avoiding the breaking changes issues by having separate extension integration points for python with the GIL and without. In other words, cpython would be compilable without the GIL, and extensions wanting true threaded parallelism would implement additional integration points to take advantage of that if run in a GIL-less python. So numpy, for example, would continue to work with the GILled python, but a data scientist would also have the GIL-less python available, set up a virtualenv for it, install numpy, and see all those benefits, without ever causing breaking changes for extension authors. Dunno if that'll work in practice, but it seems like the best possible plan going forward to get the change without causing strife.