They're asking for funding to spend on a risk-free attempt at GIL removal (risk-free since it won't bone PyPy mainline), if the attempt meaningfully succeeded I

They're asking for funding to spend on a risk-free attempt at GIL removal (risk-free since it won't bone PyPy mainline), if the attempt meaningfully succeeded I'd imagine their next step would be making it the default. A fully functional PyPy that could do heavy math in multiple threads would be an amazing tool in the box, but there are plenty of risks to that (penalizing single threaded performance, for example). So this strategy makes plenty of sense to me. They can't just do it on mainline from the outset because there are huge obstacles to overcome.. for example, that ancient foe, CPython extension interface compatibility, which assumes a single global lock covering all mutable extension data. I don't think there will ever be a way around maintaining the GIL for that, even if pure Python code can freewheel it otherwise