I do think that there is a need for a SMP friendly Python runtime.
Feel free to submit patches to Python. This was tried before, making many of the internal data structures thread-safe and adding fine-grained locks where necessary. The net effect was a 50% slow-down on uniprocessor machines running Linux. On Windows it was a bit better (Windows has more efficient low-level locks than Linux) but still a significant slowdown. So whether there's a need or not, I believe we'll all have to cope. The multi-process approach works well. For certain specialized applications, it also works to write an extension module in C that releases the GIL around CPU intensive calculations (as long as those calculations don't touch any Python objects). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)