Given GCC's announcement that Intel's STM will be an extension for C and C++ in GCC 4.7, what does this mean for Python, and the GIL? I've seen efforts made to make STM available as a context, and for use in user code. I've also read about the "old attempts way back" that attempted to use finer grain locking. The understandably failed due to the heavy costs involved in both the locking mechanisms used, and the overhead of a reference counting garbage collection system. However given advances in locking and garbage collection in the last decade, what attempts have been made recently to try these new ideas out? In particular, how unlikely is it that all the thread safe primitives, global contexts, and reference counting functions be made __transaction_atomic, and magical parallelism performance boosts ensue? I'm aware that C89, platforms without STM/GCC, and single threaded performance are concerns. Please ignore these for the sake of discussion about possibilities. http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/TransactionalMemory http://linux.die.net/man/4/futex