Thinking more about this, it seems to me that discussions of syntax for doing parallel operations and nifty classes for synchronization are a bit premature. The real question, it seems to me, is how to get Python to operate concurrently at all. Python's GIL cannot be removed without going through and fixing a thousand different places where different threads might access shared variables within the interpreter. Clearly, that's not the kind of work that is going to be done in a month or less. It might be useful to decompose that task further into some digestible chunks. One of these chunks is garbage collection. It seems to me that reference counting as it exists today would is a serious hindrance to concurrency, because it requires writing to an object each time you create a new reference. Instead, it should be possible to pass a reference to an object between threads, without actually modifying the object unless one of the threads actually changes an attribute. There are a number of papers on concurrent garbage collection out there on the web that might serve as a useful starting point. Of course, the .Net CLR and Java VM already have collectors of this type, so maybe those versions of Python already get this for free. I also wonder what other things that the GIL is protecting can be broken out as large, coherent chunks. -- Talin