It seems like you're arguing in favor of a different language rather than a different implementation of Python. If you wanted to implement, say, the Python cla

It seems like you're arguing in favor of a different language rather than a different implementation of Python. If you wanted to implement, say, the Python class/'object' type in a thread-safe way that didn't rely on a GIL and still freed memory according to approximately the same GC promises as the Python interpreter, I suspect you'd end up implementing something GIL-like in Scheme or Lisp (though my experience extends only to some Clojure and Racket in school, so I may be unaware of the capabilities of some other dialects). If you wanted to implement a language that looked a little like Python but had your favored Lisp's GC semantics and data structures, I'm sure you could. But it wouldn't be Python. That's without getting into the significant speed tradeoffs--you can make these languages fast, and I get the impression that there has been a ton of progress there in the last decade. But when Python was being created, and when it had to deal with the implications of concurrency in its chosen semantics? Not so. As I originally said: was it theoretically possible to build Python or equivalent on top of a non-C platform at the time? Sure. But I doubt that would have saved it from tradeoffs at least as severe as the GIL, and it definitely would not have been the pragmatic choice--"let's build it on $lisp_dialect and then spend time optimizing that dialect's runtime to be fast enough for us to put an interpreted scripting language on top of it" seems an unlikely strategy.