At the 2016 Python Language Summit, Larry Hastings introduced Gilectomy, his project to remove the global interpreter lock (GIL) from CPython. The GIL serializes access to the Python interpreter, so it severely limits the performance of multi-threaded Python programs. At the 2017 summit, Hastings was back to update attendees on the progress he has made and where Gilectomy is headed.

In a brief session at the 2017 Python Language Summit, Maciej Szulik gave an update on the state and plans for bugs.python.org (bpo). It is the Roundup-based bug tracker for Python; moving to GitHub has not changed that. He described the work that two Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students have done to improve the bug tracker.

As part of a discussion in 2014 about where to host some of the Python repositories, Brett Cannon was delegated the task of determining where they should end up. In early 2016, he decided that Python's code and other repositories (e.g. PEPs) should land at GitHub; at last year's language summit, he gave an overview of where things stood with a few repositories that had made the conversion. Since that time, the CPython repository has made the switch and he wanted to discuss some of the workflow issues surrounding that move at this year's summit.

Your operating system generates a lot of run-time data and statistics that are useful for monitoring system security and performance. How you get this information depends on the operating system you're running. It could be a from report in a fancy GUI, or obtained via a specialized API, or simply text values read from the filesystem in the case of Linux and /proc. However, imagine if you could get this data via an SQL query, and obtain the output as a database table or JSON object. This is exactly what osquery lets you do on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Ned Deily, release manager for the Python 3.6 and 3.7 series, opened up the 2017 edition of the Python Language Summit with a look at the release process and where things stand. It was an "abbreviated update" to his talk at last year's summit, he said. He looked to the future for 3.6 and 3.7, but also looked a bit beyond those two.

This is the start of LWN's coverage of the language summit; look for more articles over the next week or so.