A Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is a mutual exclusion lock held by a programming language interpreter thread to avoid sharing code that is not thread-safe with other threads. In languages with a GIL, there is always one GIL for each interpreter process. CPython and CRuby use GILs.
Applications written in programming languages with a GIL can be designed to use separate processes to achieve full parallelism, as each process has its own interpreter and in turn has its own GIL. Otherwise, the GIL can be a significant barrier to parallelism—a price paid for having the dynamism of the language.
Read more about Global Interpreter Lock: Benefits and Drawbacks, Examples
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