[Python-Dev] ssize_t question: longs in header files (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon May 29 23:43:54 CEST 2006

Thomas Wouters wrote:

Neal Norwitz wrote: > minus comments, etc yields several questions about whether some > values should use Pyssizet rather than C longs. In particular:

> * ints: Include/intobject.h: long obival; As Tim says, this is way out of scope for 2.5. Guido said it is ok to change this to 64-bit ints in 2.6, but I expect some embedded system developers will start screaming when they hear that: 64-bit arithmetic is expensive on a 32-bit machine.

Well, those systems shouldn't have a 64-bit Pyssizet anyway, should they?

No - but Guido said he wanted Python int to have a 64-bit representation everywhere, not a Py_ssize_t representation.

I agree using Py_ssize_t would be a "smaller" change, and one that likely has less performance impact. It would still be a large change, and should be only done if we know for sure we don't want it to be a 64-bit type always the next day.

Regards, Martin

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