[Python-Dev] The memo of pickle

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> ...
> Because these literals look like identifiers, they are interned, so the
> unpickled data structure shares the string references -- while the
> original test data has 10,000 copies of each string!
>
> If we really want this as a feature, a call to
> PyString_InternFromString() could be made under certain conditions in
> load_short_binstring() (e.g. when the length is at most 10 and
> all_name_chars() from compile.c returns true).
>
> I'm not sure that this is a desirable feature though.

I hope Oren resumes his crusade to make interned strings follow the same
refcount rules as everything else, and then we wouldn't have this fear of
interning.  BTW, nobody yet has reported any code where "indirect interning"
pays -- or even triggers once in a non-eating-its-own-tail way.