Summary

While the GIL in Python offers a simple and intuitive solution to one of the more difficult problems in the language, it also raises a number of problems of its own, concerning the ability to run multiple threads in a Python program to process CPU-bound tasks. Multiple attempts have been made to remove the GIL from the main implementation of Python, but none have been able to achieve it while maintaining the effectiveness of processing non-CPU-bound tasks, which are affected by the GIL.

In Python, multiple methods are available to provide options for working with the GIL. All in all, while it possesses considerable notoriety among the Python programming community, the GIL only affects a certain portion of the Python ecosystem, and can be seen as a necessary evil that is too essential to remove from the language. Python developers should learn to coexist with the GIL, and work around it in their concurrent programs.

In the last four chapters, we discussed some of the most well-known...