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The Global Interpreter Lock

In standard CPython only one thread executes Python bytecode at a time — threads help I/O, not CPU-bound work.

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The GIL simplifies memory management but limits CPU parallelism. Work-arounds: multiprocessing, native extensions that release the GIL (NumPy), or the experimental free-threaded CPython build (3.13+, PEP 703) that removes the GIL.

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