Right now you are right. This is about taking away that argument. There's no technical reason for this to stay true. Other than that the process of fixing this

Right now you are right. This is about taking away that argument. There's no technical reason for this to stay true. Other than that the process of fixing this is a lot of work of course. But now that the work has started, it's probably going to progress pretty steadily. It will be interesting to see how this goes over the next few years. My guess is that a lot of lessons were learned from the python 2 to 3 move. This plan seems pretty solid. And of course there's a relatively easy fix for code that can't work without a GIL: just do what people are doing today and just don't fork any threads in python. It's kind of pointless in any case with the GIL in place so not a lot of code actually depends on threads in python. Preventing the forking of threads in the presence of things still requiring the GIL sounds like a good plan. This is a bit of meta data that you could build into packages. This plan is actually proposing keeping track of what packages work without a GIL. So, that should keep people safe enough if dependency tools are updated to make use of this meta data and actively stop people from adding thread unsafe packages when threading is used. So, I have good hopes that this is going to be a much smoother transition than python 2 to 3. The initial phase is probably going to flush out a lot of packages that need fixing. But once those fixes start coming in, it's probably going to be straightforward to move forward.