A way forward in parallelising dynamic languages

Dynamic languages became very popular in recent years. At some point, the need for concurrency arose, and many of them made the choice to use a single global interpreter lock (GIL) to synchronise the interpreter in a multithreading scenario. This choice, however, makes it impossible to actually run code in parallel. Here we want to compare different approaches to replacing the GIL with a technology that allows parallel execution. We look at fine-grained locking, shared-nothing, and transactional memory (TM) approaches. We argue that software-based TM systems are the most promising, especially since they also enable the introduction of large, parallelisable atomic blocks as a better synchronisation mechanism in the language.