Learn Web Development with Python

The Global Interpreter Lock

In July 2015, I attended the EuroPython conference in Bilbao, where I gave a talk about test-driven development. The camera operator unfortunately lost the first half of it, but I've since been able to give that talk another couple of times, so you can find a complete version of it on the web. At the conference, I had the great pleasure of meeting Guido van Rossum and talking to him, and I also attended his keynote speech.

One of the topics he addressed was the infamous Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). The GIL is a mutex that protects access to Python objects, preventing multiple threads from executing Python bytecodes at once. This means that even though you can write multithreaded code in Python, there is only ...