Actually, between PyPi and "The Gilectomy", there two serious projects to get rid of it, the latter with core developer support: https://us.pycon.org/2016/sched

Actually, between PyPi and "The Gilectomy", there two serious projects to get rid of it, the latter with core developer support: https://us.pycon.org/2016/schedule/presentation/2101/ https://us.pycon.org/2016/schedule/presentation/2101/ I attended this talk, and it was really great. PyPi is pursuing software transactional memory, which is massively difficult to implement. The Gilectomy approach is much more community oriented, and focuses on the transition. Put a bit differently: it's easy to remove the GIL safely, it just incurs a non-trivial performance penalty and breaks C extensions, so the Gilectomy effort is around a combination of removing or avoiding that penalty if you're not multi-threading, and smoothly transitioning C extensions. After that talk, removing the GIL looks inevitable.