The reason why Python gets the blame is that in languages without a GIL, you can choose to use threads instead of processes in order to get better performance.

The reason why Python gets the blame is that in languages without a GIL, you can choose to use threads instead of processes in order to get better performance. Python's GIL more or less restricts you to using processes for CPU-bound concurrency. Also, as others have mentioned. Two processes can share memory (at least on Linux) by explicitly using the shared memory system calls. However, this is complicated in Python by the need for reference counting of objects created in the shared memory region.