On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 10:14:06AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I hope Oren resumes his crusade to make interned strings follow the same refcount rules as everything else, and then we wouldn't have this fear of interning. BTW, nobody yet has reported any code where "indirect interning" pays -- or even triggers once in a non-eating-its-own-tail way.
Maybe we should just drop indirect interning then. It can save 31 bits per string object, right? How to collect those savings?
I was just going back to that patch. The current savings are 24 bits (so now you see why I considered making 'interned' a type - to get that bit in without paying for a whole byte :-). Before the nitpickers point it out: yes, the average savings are likely to be less than 24 bits because of allocator overhead and nonuniform distribution of string lengths. Oren