The GIL is not an issue if you aren't interested in doing parallelism, and if you are then there are much better ways of doing it that don't rely on non-determinism (and thus are easier to reason about). You only really need python's threading library if you: 1) Need concurrency (not parallelism), 2) Don't need that many threads, and 3) Are okay with dealing with potential shared mutable state and synchronization of said state (the Queue library is pretty useful in that regard). For some insight on the difference between parallelism and concurrency see: http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/parallelism-co...
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The GIL is not an issue if you aren't interested in doing parallelism, and if you are then there are much better ways of doing it that don't rely on non-determinism (and thus are easier to reason about). You only really need python's threading library if you: 1) Need concurrency (not parallelism), 2) Don't need that many threads, and 3) Are okay with dealing with potential shared mutable state and synchronization of said state (the Queue library is pretty useful in that regard). For some insight on the difference between parallelism and concurrency see: http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/parallelism-co...