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Thu Sep 13 12:55:27 CEST 2007 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-September/074607.html

On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:19:21PM +0200, André Malo wrote:
> > Pardon my ignorance but why does Python do reference counting for truly
> > global and static objects like None, True, False, small and cached
> > integers, sys and other builtins? If I understand it correctly these
> > objects are never garbaged collected (at least they shouldn't) until the
> > interpreter exits. Wouldn't it decrease the overhead and increase speed
> > when Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF are NOOPs for static and immutable objects?
> 
> The check what kind of object you have takes time, too. Right now, just 
> counting up or down is most likely faster than that check on every refcount 
> operation.

To put it another way, would it actually matter if the reference
counts for such objects became hopelessly wrong due to non-atomic
adjustments?

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[Python-Dev] Removing the GIL (Me, not you!)