Global Interpreter Lock

In one of the previous sections we discussed I/O and CPU bound programs. In this lesson, we'll understand why only I/O bound Python programs can leverage multithreading to speed up execution time. But first, a quick refresher of how Python works is necessary to understand the acronym GIL or global interpreter lock.

How Python works

Python is an interpreted language, that is, there is no static time compiling as that happens in the case of Java, C or C++. The program that interprets user code is called the Interpreter. ...