Instagram: 40% Py3 to 99% Py3 in 10 months (Posting On Python-List Prohibited)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:11:25 -0700, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

> On Tuesday, June 20, 2017 at 6:16:05 PM UTC+12, wxjm... at gmail.com wrote:
>> - Py3 on Windows just does not work.
> 
> Whose fault is that?



Pay no attention to wxjmfauth and his complaints that Python 3 does not 
work. He's either trolling for a reaction, or has an obsessive idée fixe 
that Python 3.3+ Unicode handling is "broken" because it uses an 
implementation which, way back in the earliest 3.3 alpha releases when he 
first tested it, was slightly slower that 3.2 for some terrible 
benchmarks.

Python 3.3 strings are optimized for memory saving: the string will use 
one, two or four bytes, according to the maximum needed for that 
particular string. This usually results in good memory savings and faster 
code, but if you perform an artificial benchmark of creating and 
destroying millions of strings as fast as you can, the overhead is a 
little greater than for 3.2 and it is a bit slower.

In other words, if all you do is create millions of strings, destroy 
them, then create them again, and no more processing or work, then Python 
3.3's string handling is slower than 3.2.

Obviously this is a trade-off that is worth it for practical speed 
increases in real code due to the smaller memory usage of many Python 
strings. But jmfauth doesn't see it that way, and so he has invented in 
his own head a story that Python is "broken" because it doesn't use UTF-16 
everywhere, that there's some sort of conspiracy among the Python 
developers to hit Europeans with higher memory use than Americans, and he 
complains about perfectly normal Unicode decoding or encoding exceptions 
as if they were segfaults.

It's quite sad really, if he's trolling he is the most dedicated troll 
I've ever seen, continuing his efforts despite hardly any reaction from 
anyone. But I think he is just a crackpot.



-- 
Steve