I suspect at this point it will require a new interpreter to fully address the deeply-embedded assumptions about memory access and bytecode execution in CPython

I suspect at this point it will require a new interpreter to fully address the deeply-embedded assumptions about memory access and bytecode execution in CPython. This has been tried many times, though, with only PyPy really seeing much traction. CPython being the de-facto interpreter, and the huge ecosystem of widely-used C extensions, makes any change likely to be slow... and the upside would need to be very compelling. I think what we see instead is people moving to different runtimes altogether -- golang, jvm, v8, whatever. I would suggest that Python has gone off the rails trying to mimic other languages too much recently. At some point the identity crisis hopefully ends and Python will return to it's strengths -- which are best expressed by the Zen of Python. Until then, get ready for more features.