On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 19:38:33 +0200 "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
On http://bugs.python.org/issue9778 you elaborated on what the PEP would entail in its current state:
“No, vice versa. The PEP promises that the ABI won't change until Python 4. For any change that might break the ABI, either a backwards-compatible solution needs to be found, or the change be deferred to Python 4.”
This sounds like it could be detrimental by blocking desired improvements (the aforementioned issue is a potential example of this).
Notice that it's only potential: in the specific case, there would be an ABI-compatible way of introducing wide hashes, using a second type slot.
Yes, but it would add complication, and be potentially detrimental to performance.
If you think this is too restrictive, please point out specific aspects that you think might need to change in the mid-term future. They should then be excluded from the ABI.
I have no a priori knowledge of what might happen in the future :) That said, looking at the PEP, I was wondering whether fields such as ob_type, ob_refcnt, ob_size have to be directly accessible, rather than through a macro-turned-into-a-function such as Py_REFCNT().