I don't think python is ever going to get rid of the GIL. I haven't looked but there's two things that may speed things up quite a bit:
- Use native types
- Provide the ability to turn "off" the GIL if you know you will not be using multi-threading within a process.
I guess that is my naive wish list for a short term speed up :)
I agree, it doesn't really matter, but I've been programming long enough that I can see it being that top step that's always half an inch too tall that I'm going to stub my toe on.
The "idiomatic" way to access the first element in an array/sequence in julia is to use the `first` function, e.g. `first(arr)` vs. `arr[1]`. This works across a larger number of array types, including OffsetArrays with 0-based index offsets.