As far as I am aware, the big issue with removing the GIL is the vast amount of C based packages that depend on the GIL.
Not just internal packages, but a lot of third party ones.<p>That means removing the GIL would all of a sudden break a lot of code, and require a lot of packages to be rewritten. Inevitably, some will not be rewritten, remain broken, and a schism in Python might form again.<p>Perhaps Python should try making message passing based concurrency better. It tends to lead to more robust code than shared memory concurrency. I could see how that might be too far a departure from what people expect though.
Big discussion of this yesterday: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28880782</a>