Halfway on the path to community support for free-threaded Python
5 points by ngoldbaum
5 points by ngoldbaum
This is actually a good solution to the problem of deciding when "community support" for an incompatible change is available.
Some years ago, the Python community had a terrible time with the release of the not-backward-compatible Python 3.0. The breaks with backward compatibility were (in my opinion) vastly better and necessary (eg: treat strings as unicode, not bytes) but it split the community for years, despite the existence of (in my opinion) very good migration tools like 2to3.
Free threading is also CLEARLY better (in my opinion), and (nearly) transparent to Python code, but not to C extensions. The approach of monitoring the N (chosen to be 360 just because it's a nice round number) most popular projects and track how many of them support the free threading build seems like a good way of marking progress. And the effort to provide support for those projects from those promoting the free threading by writing pull requests for their repositories seems like a wonderful approach to accelerating it.