On 08/02/2014 02:48, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Thu, 06 Feb 2014 05:51:54 -0800, wxjmfauth wrote:
Sorry, I'm only pointing you may lose memory when working with short
strings as it was explained. I really, very really, do not see what is
absurd or obsure in:
sys.getsizeof('abc' + 'EURO')
46
sys.getsizeof(('abc' + 'EURO').encode('utf-32'))
37
Why do you care about NINE bytes? The least amount of memory in any PC
that I know about is 500000000 bytes, more than fifty million times more.
And you are whinging about wasting nine bytes?
If you care about that lousy nine bytes, Python is not the language for
you. Go and program in C, where you can spent ten or twenty times longer
programming, but save nine bytes in every string.
Nobody cares about your memory "benchmark" except you. Python is not
designed to save memory, Python is designed to use as much memory as
needed to give the programmer an easier job. In C, I can store a single
integer in a single byte. In Python, horror upon horrors, it takes 14
bytes!!!
py> sys.getsizeof(1)
14
We consider it A GOOD THING that Python spends memory for programmer
convenience and safety. Python looks for memory optimizations when it can
save large amounts of memory, not utterly trivial amounts. So in a Python
wide build, a ten-thousand block character string requires a little bit
more than 40KB. In Python 3.3, that can be reduced to only 10KB for a
purely Latin-1 string, or 20K for a string without any astral characters.
That's the sort of memory savings that are worthwhile, reducing memory
usage by 75%.
Could Python save memory by using UTF-8? Yes. But it would cost
complexity and time, strings would be even slower than they are now. That
is not a trade-off that the core developers have chosen to make, and I
agree with them.
This is a C +1 to save memory when compared against this Python +1 :)
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
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