> I'm really glad to see some of the Python committers taking a serious look at the GIL.

People have been taking serious looks at the GIL for a long time (there were technically working GIL-less versions of 1.5). The issue has never been that no one wanted to work on it (let alone that it was impossible), but that so far the single-threaded performance hit has been too large to be acceptable to the core team.

> Now, if we could only get an optional static type checker... (heresy, I know).

Er… how would that be heretic when Python 3's annotations were introduced to support exactly this?