[Python-Dev] Rethinking intern() and its data structure (original) (raw)

Collin Winter collinw at gmail.com
Thu Apr 9 18:36:29 CEST 2009

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 9:34 AM, John Arbash Meinel <john.arbash.meinel at gmail.com> wrote:

...

Anyway, I the internals of intern() could be done a bit better. Here are some concrete things:

[snip] Memory usage is definitely something we're interested in improving. Since you've already looked at this in some detail, could you try implementing one or two of your ideas and see if it makes a difference in memory consumption? Changing from a dict to a set looks promising, and should be a fairly self-contained way of starting on this. If it works, please post the patch on http://bugs.python.org with your results and assign it to me for review. Thanks, Collin Winter (I did end up subscribing, just with a different email address :) What is the best branch to start working from? "trunk"?

That's a good place to start, yes. If the idea works well, we'll want to port it to the py3k branch, too, but that can wait.

Collin

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