[Python-Dev] [RELEASED] Python 2.7.5 (original) (raw)

Pierre Rouleau prouleau001 at gmail.com
Mon May 20 01:37:46 CEST 2013

On that topic of bitness for 64-bit platforms, would it not be better for CPython to be written such that it uses the same 64-bit strategy on all 64-bit platforms, regardless of the OS?

As it is now, Python running on 64-bit Windows behaves differently (in terms of bits for the Python's integer) than it is behaving in other platforms. I assume that the Python C code is using the type 'long' instead of something like the C99 int64_t. Since Microsoft is using the LLP64 model and everyone else is using the LP64, code using the C 'long' type would mean something different on Windows than Unix-like platforms. Isn't that unfortunate?

Would it not be better to hide the difference at Python level?

Or is it done this way to allow existing C extension modules to work the way they were and request Python code that depends on integer sizes to check sys.maxint?

Also, I would imagine that the performance delta between a Windows 32-bit Python versus 64-bit Python is not as big as it would be on a Unix computer. As far as I can se Python-64 bits on Windows 64-bit OS has a larger address space and probably does not benefit from anything else. Has anyone have data on this?

Thanks

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