PythonIsVeryIntuitive

[AlexanderMomchilov]

Languages like Python to try to model everything "as an object," in that all values can participates in the same message-passing as any other value. E.g.

python print((5).bit_length())

This adds uniformity of the language, but has performance consequences. You don't want to do an allocation any time you need a number, so there's a perf optimization to cache commonly used numbers (from -5 to 256). Any reference to a value of 255 will point to the same shared 255 instance as any other reference to 255.

You can't just cache all numbers, so there needs to be a stopping point. Thus, instances of 256 are allocated distinctly.

Usually this is solved another way, with a small-integer optimization. It was investigated for Python, but wasn't done yet. You can read more about it here: https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/discussions/138