Simon Willison’s Weblog

20th September 2022 - Link Blog

PEP 554 – Multiple Interpreters in the Stdlib: Shared data (via) Python 3.12 hopes to introduce multiple interpreters as part of the Python standard library, so Python code will be able to launch subinterpreters, each with their own independent GIL. This will allow Python code to execute on multiple CPU cores at the same time while ensuring existing code (and C modules) that rely on the GIL continue to work.

The obvious question here is how data will be shared between those interpreters. This PEP proposes a channels mechanism, where channels can be used to send just basic Python types between interpreters: None, bytes, str, int and channels themselves (I wonder why not floats?)