[Python-Dev] Int FutureWarnings and other 2.4 TODOs (original) (raw)

Thomas Heller theller at python.net
Fri Dec 5 10:17:50 EST 2003

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

Hmmmm... How important is the "less memory" angle versus the "faster" angle? Why not just add a few bytes to the long type to store an int? If you're using the int, the pointer is NULL, and you're saving that memory, at least. The only harm is some extra memory in the type object. I'd say that the "less memory" angle is pretty important. The int implementation has been using every trick in the book to save memory from very early days on: it has the most sophisticated special-purpose allocator, and it uses a cache for popular values, and you really can't squeeze any more bits out of the structure.

IIUC, doing range(10000000) in a program somewhere allocates 10 million integers, and these are never freed, they live in the cache forever. Correct?

I do not have an actual use case for this, but it seems somewhat strange. And the point comes up from time to time on c.l.p.

Thomas

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