Am I the only one who sort of fears the day when Python loses the GIL? I don't think Python developers know what they’re asking for. I don't really trust complex multithreaded code in any language. Python, with its dynamic nature, I trust least of all.
This is a common mistake and very badly communicated. The GIL do not make the Python code thread-safe. It only protect the internal CPython state. Multi-threaded Python code is not thread-safe today.
Well, I think you can manipulate a dict from two different threads in Python, today, without any risk of segfaults.
You can do so in free-threaded Python too, right? The dict is still protected by a lock, but one that’s much more fine-grained than the GIL.