Yeah, That's what I thought. I think the greatest barrier now is that most multithreaded python code right now is just barely thread-safe, even with the GIL. I

Yeah, That's what I thought. I think the greatest barrier now is that most multithreaded python code right now is just barely thread-safe, even with the GIL. I occasionally have to remind colleagues that even though the GIL guarantees instructions are atomic, you need to use mutexes and other synchronization primitives to ensure there is no race condition between multiple instructions. I'd imagine this change would be an optional interpreter feature initially, since removing the GIL would break the vast majority of code out in the wild, and it would be much more difficult to create an automated conversion tool like they did with the syntactic changes between 2.7 and 3