The GIL is an implementation artifact mostly due to the reference counting memory management. Besides phobia towards threads, the Python crowd also seems phobic towards tracing garbage collection. There is an ongoing project to make CPython run without the GIL yet still use reference counting. I wonder how many bugs this will surface or introduce.

Most concurrent Python code that I've written has not been cpu intensive, FWIW. Just an application talking to a bunch of i/o ports or sockets, but mostly idle. My CPU intensive stuff has tended to be single threaded so I can just launch instances in separate processes. YMMV.

Yeah the tooling situation is crazy enough that I don't begin to understand it.