>>6
Even Google is unable to remove the GIL. They've dropped that out of the project plan for unladen swallow. The problem is not the interpreter; it's that the language itself has some tremendous design flaws.
Look at what Google is accomplishing with this:
Unladen Swallow 2009Q3 is the second release of Unladen Swallow to use LLVM for native code generation, and the first to use runtime feedback for optimization.
Highlights:
* Unladen Swallow 2009Q3 uses up to 930% less memory than the 2009Q2 release.
Lowlights:
* Memory usage is still 2-3x that of Python 2.6.1.
http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/Release2009Q3
(And I say this as a big fan of Python; it's probably my favorite high-level language.)