On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 12:58 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla.mol...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is awful. It is broken for arrays longer than 2**49 elements. With 8 > bytes per PyObject* pointer this is >4096 terabytes of RAM. I don't see how > we can fix this in time.
It's even worse than that. Unless you have a list of 2**49 references to the same few objects, you're going to need to have some actual content for each one. The absolute best you could do is to sort integers, which would take 32 bytes each [1]; if you're sorting strings, they'll be 90 bytes each, so the integers are our best bet. So add another *five* powers of two to the RAM requirements. Also, who has that many elements to sort, and wouldn't do better to stick 'em into an indexed database of some description? I mean, good to know that this'll be fixed, but it really isn't likely to come up any time soon. ChrisA [1] Calculated using Python 3.5 amd64 Linux, your figures may vary. Small integers (less than 2**30) take only 28 bytes, but that's dwarfed by the rest of them taking 32. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
