[Python-Dev] PEP 393: Flexible String Representation

[Stefan Behnel]

"Martin v. Löwis", 24.01.2011 21:17:
> The Py_UNICODE type is still supported but deprecated. It is always
> defined as a typedef for wchar_t, so the wstr representation can double
> as Py_UNICODE representation.

It's too bad this isn't initialised by default, though. Py_UNICODE is the 
only representation that can be used efficiently from C code and Cython 
relies on it for fast text processing. This proposal will therefore likely 
have a pretty negative performance impact on extensions written in Cython 
as the compiler could no longer expect this representation to be available 
instantaneously.

Stefan