[Python-Dev] tick_counter?

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
>> Anyone know what the purpose of PyThreadState.tick_counter might be?
>> AFAICT, it's initialized to 0, incremented by the eval loop now &
>> again, and otherwise never referenced.

[Hye-Shik Chang]
>> According to SF #617311 written by Armin:
>>
>> tstate->tick_counter is incremented whenever the check_interval
>> ticker reaches zero.
>>
>> The purpose is to give a useful measure of the number of interpreted
>> bytecode instructions in a given thread. This extremely lightweight
>> statistic collector can be of interest to profilers (like
>> psyco.jit()).
>> ...

Thanks!  That rings a vague bell, and I checked in a code comment so this
doesn't continue to look like a mistake.

I know the Python source has a habit of not commenting the purpose of struct
members, but that's not something to emulate, and comments about something
this obscure definitely belong in the code instead of the checkin comment.