[Python-Dev] The memo of pickle

[Oren Tirosh]

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