On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 6:12 PM Eric V. Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:
I thought the important part of the proposal was to have multiple PyHandles that point to the same PyObject (you couldn't "directly compare handles with each other to learn about object identity"). But I'll admit I'm not sure why this would be a win. Then of course they couldn't be regular pointers.
Whenever PyPy passes an object from PyPy -> C, then it has to invent a "PyObject*" to represent the PyPy object. 0.1% of the time, the C code will use C pointer comparison to implement an "is" check on this PyObject*. But PyPy doesn't know which 0.1% of the time this will happen, so 100% of the time an object goes from PyPy -> C, PyPy has to check and update some global intern table to figure out whether this particular object has ever made the transition before and use the same PyObject*. 99.9% of the time, this is pure overhead, and it slows down one of *the* most common operations C extension code does. If C extensions checked object identity using some explicit operation like PyObject_Is() instead of comparing pointers, then PyPy could defer the expensive stuff until someone actually called PyObject_Is(). Note: numbers are made up and I have no idea how much overhead this actually adds. But I'm pretty sure this is the basic idea that Armin's talking about. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org