I mean it won't cause errors within the basic data structure access operations. I'm not talking about composition. In Java a hash table write can fail with an exception if there is a concurrent write that conflicts. A Python dict write is atomic, because it happens within a single instruction as you say and so will not be interrupted and will never fail. That's what you aren't getting in Java. That expectation is very hard to provide without a GIL. Jython does it with blunt fine grained locking, but that's slow.