Some comments:
Branding
Branding is important. I suggest using the term “Multicore Python” for this effort instead of “nogil”. It sounds much more impressive, while “no GIL” is more obscure and negative. It worked for OCaml.
Use cases
I’d like to offer some non-AI/ML use cases that I can think of which I believe, if no global lock was present, would use shared memory threading instead of multiple processes or multiple interpreters:
- Linters like flake8 (granularity: file)
- Test frameworks like pytest-xdist (granularity: test)
- WSGI/HTTP servers (granularity: request)
Memory model
Note: I have to admit I haven’t read the PEP in detail, so this might be discussed there, apologies if so.
When shared-memory parallelism is available, a Memory Model is needed in order to program it safely. Examples: C/C++, Java, Go.
In particular I’m interested what actually happens if a data race happens. For example what happens in the classic “2 threads increment the same counter” scenario. Is it nasal demons undefined behavior as in C (AFAIK Python never had this), or something safer as in Java and Go (see last paragraph here)?