[Python-3000] Principles

[Josiah Carlson]

Ivan Krstic <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Josiah Carlson wrote:
> > I believe that no performance improvement warrants such large scale
> > breakage of 3rd party extensions.
> 
> If there's an implementation that's deemed superior to what's there now,
> then 3.0 is exactly the right time to break 3rd party extensions. Of
> course 3.0 isn't a blank check for gratuitous breakage, but being
> conservative *solely* for the purpose of not breaking compatibility
> defeats the purpose of having a 3.0 separate from the 2.x series, IMO.

The question is whether or not the breakage would be "gratuitous".

The only use of lists that wouldn't be broken is if people relied solely
on the use of PyList_* functions and not lst->ob_item[] references.

A quick google code search offers about 5-10 3rd party examples against
40 varaints of the Python C source.  The lack of results seems a bit
fishy, but maybe my search for  \-\>ob_item\[ was too restrictive.
Searching for \-\>ob_item gets more results, some of which are things
like PyLucene, guppy, etc.  This also seems a bit slim (Google doesn't
seem to index all projects on sourceforge).


 - Josiah