> ...reference counting was pointed out to me and I realized it would be pointless -- the act of merely looking at an object changes the object, so copy-on-writ

> ...reference counting was pointed out to me and I realized it would be pointless -- the act of merely looking at an object changes the object, so copy-on-write means copy-everything. Hmm...might it be worthwhile to work around this by storing reference counts in a separate set of pages, and having each object instead hold a constant pointer to its refcount? Presumably the extra level of indirection would have some degree of performance impact, but if it allows CoW to actually work in a meaningful way... Though I guess that would probably break every C extension in existence, no? (Note: I know absolutely nothing about Python's C extension API, just guessing.)