[Python-ideas] Copy-on-write when forking a python process

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/12/2011 9:32 PM, Mike Graham wrote:

> Python interns some strings and small ints. The intern builtin ensures

intern is deprecated in 2.7 and gone in 3.x.

> a string is in the former cache and isn't applicable for other
> objects; Python automatically interns strings that look like
> identifiers and you should never use the intern function yourself.
>
> These optimizations have nothing to do with reference counting and
> could be applicable under other garbage collection schemes. Reference
> counting doesn't mean that interned objects can never be freed; are
> you familiar with the idea of weak references?

"Changed in version 2.3: Interned strings are not immortal (like they 
used to be in Python 2.2 and before); you must keep a reference to the 
return value of intern() around to benefit from it."

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy