[Python-3000] Delayed reference counting idea

[Greg Ewing]

We seem to have a situation where we have refcounting,
which incurs a small penalty many times, but which we're
willing to pay for the benefits it brings, and locking,
which in theory should also only have a small penalty
most of the time, not much bigger than refcounting,
but it seems we're not willing to pay both these
penalties at once.

I'm wondering whether there's some way we could merge
the two -- i.e. somehow make the one mechanism serve
as both a refcounting *and* a locking mechanism at
the same time. A refcount is a count, and a semaphore
also has a count... is there some way we can make
use of that?

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | Carpe post meridiem!          	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | (I'm not a morning person.)          |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+