[Python-Dev] Allocation of shape and strides fields in Py_buffer (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Dec 11 01:35:05 CET 2008

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

This was a deliberate decision -- in fact I argued for it myself. The buffer interface is meant to be a minimal-overhead way for C code to get at the underlying data. Requiring allocation of a PyObject would be too expensive.

Tuples are used everywhere throughout the interpreter and yet they are proper PyObjects. Even simple integers are often wrapped into PyLong objects (see the getitem/setitem protocol in Py3k). I doubt Py_buffers are more critical for performance than tuples and integers are.

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