The first year of free-threaded Python

Published May 13, 2025 Last week, the CPython developers rolled out CPython 3.14.0b1. This week, PyCon 2025 kicks off in Pittsburgh, PA. Both events mark a significant milestone for the effort to ship and stabilize free-threaded Python. This is the story of the first year of that effort and how our team at Quansight played a key role in enabling experimental use of the free-threaded build with real production workflows that depend on a complex set of dependencies. Introduction: Why are we working on community support for free-threaded Python? Support for free-threaded Python unlocks the full compute power of modern hardware with multicore CPUs and GPUs now commonplace. In the GIL-enabled build, making full use of parallel algorithms that exploit all available compute resources in Python requires workarounds and careful tuning. The Python threading module is often not used because the GIL prevents useful parallel scaling. Instead, many reach for multiprocessing , but spawning proces ... Read full article.