Comment by TimJYoung

I agree that this is an implementation detail. If they were to simply use the JS model of "every thread gets its own environment and message passing is how you interact", then you could still use threads safely and achieve some pretty impressive performance improvements in some cases.

Knowing literally nothing about Python other than what I read, I'm kind of confused as to how the current implementation came to be, because it is much easier to design an interpreter that uses the JS model than one that uses a shared environment among multiple threads. I created an Object Pascal interpreter, and it has this design: it can spin up an interpreter instance in any thread pretty quickly because it's greenfield all the way with a new stack, new heap, etc.