[Python-Dev] proposal: add basic time type to the standard library

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
> WRT RAM usage, a Python int is no smaller than a TimeStamp object.

[Guido[
> Wrong, unless TimeStamps also use a custom allocator.

Good point, and it doesn't (it uses PyObject_NEW).

I don't think counting fractions of bytes is of great interest here, though,
since I (still) believe it's the massive Zope DateTime type that's the focus
of complaints.

> The custom allocator uses 12 bytes per int (on a 32-bit machine) and
> incurs malloc overhead + 8 bytes of additional overhead for every 82 ints.
> That's about 12.2 bytes per int object; using malloc it would probably
> be 24 bytes.  (PyMalloc would probably do a little better, except it
> would still round up to 16 bytes.)

pymalloc overhead is a few percent; would work out to 16+f bytes per int
object, for some f < 1.0.  A difference is that "total memory dedicated to
ints" never shrinks using the custom allocator, but can get reused for other
objects under pymalloc.