While the steering council is drafting our full response to PEP 703 for our official acceptance, one thing we’ve agreed upon in our discussions in the steering council:
We don’t want this to be known as “nogil” Python as a public moniker. That nickname:
- does not communicate well to most non-core devs, people need not know what a GIL is.
- contains a negative.
So we should also shift towards not using the term “nogil” ourselves to avoid confusion before we start making any releases.
As such, the letter "n" as current PEP 703 text suggests should not be used for an ABI tag. We’d prefer the letter "t" (read it as implying “threading” and short for “free-threading”). This needs a minor update to the PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython | peps.python.org section.
A more appropriate term for this experimental in 3.13 build if you have a need to provide builds is “free-threading”. We realize “free-threading” doesn’t roll off the tongue like two-syllable “nogil” does, but it should be more understandable to people-who-are-not-us.
While I’m behind on my reading, @colesbury seems to have already picked up on the desire to use "t" instead of "n" in the other thread posted today that I believe this conversation spawned off of. (yay!)