Sept. 12, 2002
5:19 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".
Yup. That's why I think it might have to be a 3-valued config option, relevant for 64-bit machines only: "compat", "optimal", or "right". --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)