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What is GIL (Global Interpreter Lock)?

A mutex in CPython that allows only one thread to execute Python bytecode at a time, limiting true parallelism.

The GIL is a mechanism in CPython that prevents multiple threads from executing Python bytecode simultaneously. This simplifies memory management but limits CPU-bound multi-threaded performance.

Workarounds include multiprocessing (separate processes), asyncio (concurrent I/O), C extensions that release the GIL, or alternative implementations like PyPy. For I/O-bound tasks, the GIL is less problematic.

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