PyErlang: A Stepping Stone towards Behaviour-Oriented Concurrency in Python (Keynote)

Python was designed in an era of mostly single-core machines, where concurrency was typically not parallel, and Dennard scaling made us rely on ever-faster single core CPUs coming onto the market every year. In this context, Python's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)-based design is easily motivated: only one thread may interpret bytecodes at a time in a Python program. This buys a lot of simplicity for your runtime, but it also means that throwing more cores at a Python program does not make it go faster.