I'm afraid that the GIL is killing the usefullness of python for some types of applications now where 4,8 oder 64 threads on a chip are here or comming soon.
What is the status about that for the future of python? I know that at the moment allmost nobody in the scripting world has solved this problem, but it bites and it bites hard. Only groovy as a Java Plugin has support but i never tried it. Writing an interpreter that does MT this seems to be extremely difficult to do it right, with lots of advanced stuff like CAS and lock free programming. Even Smalltalk and Common Lisp didn't get it until know (with the exception of certain experiments). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list