[Python-3000] C API for ints and strings

[Guido van Rossum]

On 9/9/07, Nicholas Bastin <nick.bastin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not suggesting that Python handle small ints itself  and then farm
> out large integer computations, I'm suggesting that since we've
> already coalesced small ints into 'large' ones, we might want to
> review the performance implications of that decision, and possibly
> consider that other people have already solved this problem.  Clearly
> GMP appears to fail on a technical level, but there might be other
> options worth investigating.

The performance problems that are affecting us most are for
small-value ints. The old PyInt type has many custom optimizations to
help. I think we could do worse than re-introducing some of the same
tricks, retargeted to PyLong (which never got much attention for
small-value performance).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)