The global interpreter lock, when I first heard about it, I thought of it as a threading thing. And it sort of is, but you know, it's primarily says, let's create a system so that we don't have to do locks on variables. So basically, all the memory management can happen without the overhead of taking a lock or releasing a lock. It's actually an interesting kind of throwback to the way that computing happened in like the eighties and early nineties.