I don't know a lot about the history of Python and the GIL, but did they ever consider optionally removing the GIL or leaving it in depending upon some switch? Go has GOMAXPROCS which defaults to 1 to avoid the overhead of locking when only a single thread will be used for similar purposes.
I guess back in 1996 a system like that may have been considered overkill because multithreading was still pretty exotic.
I guess back in 1996 a system like that may have been considered overkill because multithreading was still pretty exotic.