This is the one area where things have changed considerably since that 15-year-old article!

Oh, there will always have to be some sort of locking, of course, but we are moving quite rapidly toward being able to have multiple independent locks: https://peps.python.org/pep-0684/

The beauty is that if there is only one interpreter lock, then the performance of single-threaded code should be identical!

It's likely these individual locks will still have the name GIL, but they won't really be "Global" anymore, so suddenly a lot of parallelism will be liberated for us.