On Wed, 12 Oct 2016 14:14:48 -0700 Nathaniel Smith njs@pobox.com wrote:
The proposal is that it should be documented as being part of the language spec starting in 3.4 (or whatever). So applications that support Python 2.7 can't rely on it, sure. But if I have an application that requires, say, 3.5+ but I don't want to depend on CPython-only implementation details, then I'm still allowed to use it.
AFAIK basically the only project that would be affected by this is PyPy, and I when I asked on #pypy they said:
<cfbolz> njs`: I think we either plan to or already support this
so I'm not sure why this is controversial.
The main reason it could be controversial is if someone finds out another optimization that is made difficult or impossible by the O(1) delete-at-front guarantee. That sounds unlikely, though, since the general structure of a bytearray is constrained by other factors as well (such as the C API and the buffer API).
By the way, to answer another question, the reason this wasn't made part of the spec originally is that the feature in itself was already contentious (see issue tracker discussion). Now that more people seem to get interested in network programming, they seem to understand the point ;-)
Regards
Antoine.