Goodbye GIL: Exploring the Free-threaded mode in Python 3.13

Adarsh Divakaran

Python 3.13 was the first Python version released with a free-threaded mode. Even though the default interpreter still uses the GIL, it has provisions that allow us to run a free-threaded version of the interpreter with the GIL disabled.

In this talk, we’ll set up and run the free-threaded interpreter and benchmark it with the GIL-enabled version for various kinds of tasks. We'll assess the impact on single-threaded vs multithreaded code and test the performance across CPU-bound and I/O-bound tasks, aiming to identify scenarios where free-threaded Python excels.