Removing the GIL is non-trivial.  But I&#x27;m surprised that they didn&#x27;t take advantage of Python 3 to move to a more performant register-based interpreter.  Several people expressed interest in building one, and working prototypes were even made, but the core developers didn&#x27;t seem much interested in performance upgrades.<p>I think their attitude is generally, &quot;if it&#x27;s performance-critical, write it in C&quot;, which was a good approach 15 years ago.  However, Python&#x27;s competition now comes from languages like Go and Rust that have both good performance <i>and</i> are user-friendly and productive (with features such as expressive syntax and a comprehensive standard library).