Basically not! :-D

Not for the vast majority of developers, at least.

If you just "disabled the GIL" in existing multithreaded code, then each time you, say, appended to a list, you'd have to have some type of lock to prevent the C structure that implements that list from becoming inconsistent (and probably crashing Python eventually).

Now, these new compilation flags do let you turn off the GIL if you recompile Python, but the expectation is that if you do that, all your existing multithreaded code will cease to be reliable, and you'll have to provide your own, much coarser grained locking somehow. This is definitely worth it for specialized applications which need a big speed boost, but not for your average code.

(And most people want their code to run on any Python, not just a specially compiled version of Python.)

In Python 3.13, you'll be able to run multiple subinterpreters, which mitigates the GIL issue - but each one of these interpreters has their own GIL.

Great article, accept claps!