One of Python's strongest points is the ease of writing C and C++ extensions to speed up processor intensive parts of the code. Can these extensions avoid the Global Interpreter Lock or are they also restricted by the GIL? If not, then this "ease of extension" is even more of a killer feature than I previously realized. I suspect the answer is not a simple yes-or-no but I am not sure, so I am asking the question here on StackOverflow.
Check out Cython, it has similar syntax to Python but with a few constructs like "cdef", fast numpy access functions, and a "with nogil" statement (which does what it says).
Concurrency: Are Python extensions written in C/C++ affected by the Global Interpreter Lock?