Python behind the scenes #13: the GIL and its effects on Python multithreading

As you probably know, the GIL stands for the Global Interpreter Lock, and its job is to make the CPython interpreter thread-safe. The GIL allows only one OS thread to execute Python bytecode at any given time, and the consequence of this is that it's not possible to speed up CPU-intensive Python code by distributing the work among multiple threads. This is, however, not the only negative effect of