[Python-Dev] reference counting in Py3K

[Fernando Perez]

Josiah Carlson wrote:

> Here's a perspective "from the trenches" as it were.
> 
> I've been writing quite a bit of code, initially all in Python (27k
> lines in the last year or so).  It worked reasonably well and fast. It
> wasn't fast enough. I needed a 25x increase in performance, which would
> have been easily attainable if I were to rewrite everything in C, but
> writing a module in pure C is a bit of a pain (as others can attest), so
> I gave Pyrex a shot (after scipy.weave.inline, ick).

Would you care to elaborate on the reasons behind the 'ick'?  I'm a big fan of
weave.inline and have used it very successfully for my own needs, so I'm
genuinely curious (as I tend to teach its use, I like to know of potential
problems I may not have seen).  

I should also add that a while ago a number of extremely annoying spurious
recompilation bugs were finally fixed, in case this was what bothered you. 
Those bugs (hard to find) made weave in certain cases useless, as it
recompiled everything blindly, thus killing its whole purpose.

Feel free to reply off-list if you feel this is not appropriate for python-dev,
though I think that a survey of the c-python bridges may be of interest to
others.

Cheers,

f