Sept. 12, 2002
5:10 p.m.
So perhaps the refcnt should have been a long in the first place. A similar argument may hold for the length of e.g. strings and lists: one could wish to have a list of more than 2 billion elements, or a string containing more than 2 gigabytes (that much RAM is easily found on the larger 64-bit servers, I believe).
Opinions?
If you change to longs it seems the reported performance increase goes away, which would seem to eliminate one of the motivations for accepting the pain of a binary incompatibility. Leaving just "getting it right". Mats