Funny, but lots of other dynamic langs interface with C without such a badly designed GIL. The GIL actually proves my point. The fact that people will excuse such poor performance in a dynamic lang is a matter of misplaced expectation. This was a clever hack in the beginning, but proved to be a major design flaw going forward. A performance hit of over 3 orders of magnitude is not excusable for any language, "scripting" or otherwise.
Yes, it was a clever hack in the beginning - which is what counted. Given that Python's implementation (CPython, with a GIL) was started in December of 1989 (http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/brief-timeline-of...) I'd say that it worked fabulously at the time, and pretty much until multicore/multiprocessor architectures really became the topic du-jour.
Think about that; CPython's internal are old - sure, they've changed and been cleaned up and fixed up here and there, but it's still old. Obviously if it was written today, it might be done differently knowing what we know now.
So, yeah - it is excusable, given that it meets the original design goals of making C extensions dirt simply to write (really, they are dirt simple) and making the common, single threaded/single processor use case fast "enough".
Given the hindsight everyone has now - yeah, the GIL as it exists today is grossly suboptimal, and I don't know of anyone of rational mind or body who doesn't want it to go the way of the dodo, or at least be replaced with a cleaner, simpler and faster implementation. The latter is in progress in Python 3 - the former is a lot more difficult despite a lot of hand waving from non-committers and armchair interpreter designers.
Python's performance can (and is, and will) be improved over time, but as I said originally, it was never advertised as "the fastest" or "the most concurrent" language, those two things have never been a core "feature" of the language.
Which is what I also implied. C extensions are simple to use for Visualworks Smalltalk, whose development goes back in direct lineage to 1989. Again, why is the GIL such a problem?
