The Python team is finally removing the GIL…

Which means you can now write true multi-threading code.

This is what other developers think:

And this is what I think. In the bottom right corner:

To understand why it’s a big deal, first let’s briefly talk about what the GIL is.

The GIL, or the Global Interpreter Lock, ensures only one thread can run Python bytecode at a time.

Even if your computer has eight cores and you are using multi-threading, Python’s like, “Nah, you can only use one at a time.”

So, multi-threading in Python is actually fake. What really happens is that Python quickly switches between different threads.

That’s fine for small programs.

But for programs that need to do lots of CPU-heavy tasks, like image processing,

It’s a huge slowdown.

So why did Python even have this thing?

Back in the early days, most computers looked like this:

Most of them only have one core.

So the GIL makes sense because it made memory management simple.

But now, most computers look like this:

With multi-core processors everywhere, GIL is less of a safety net and more of a bottleneck.

Starting from Python 3.14, you can disable the GIL. It means that you can write true multi-threaded code today.

It also means there’s one extra way to add bugs to your code.

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