What to expect when you are expecting Free Threading

We know that Free Threading will take a long expecting, so why not begin preparing by exploring and utilising subinterpreters while we wait? Perhaps they could even fill the gap you believe NoGIL will fill when it eventually arrives.

Lately, PEP 703, PEP 554, PEP 734, and other related proposals have been getting more attention than ever. The growing interest in parallelism in Python is exciting, but it’s crucial to take a step-by-step approach and stay grounded.

To make informed decisions about parallelism in Python, it’s essential to understand the available options—not just as a stopgap while waiting for Free Threading, but as real solutions to different problems.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into subinterpreters, not merely as an alternative to Free Threading but as powerful tools in their own right. We’ll explore their internal workings, when and how to use them effectively and walk through real-world, practical examples. Additionally, we’ll discuss their short and mid-term future in Python’s ecosystem.

To get the most out of this session, you should be familiar with the differences between concurrency and parallelism and understand the GIL and why it poses challenges in specific scenarios.