PEP 623 – Remove wstr from Unicode ¶

Motivation ¶

str is one of the most used types in Python. Even most simple ASCII strings have a wstr member. It consumes 8 bytes per string on 64-bit systems.

To support legacy Unicode object, many Unicode APIs must call PyUnicode_READY().

We can remove this overhead too by dropping support of legacy Unicode object. Simplicity

Supporting legacy Unicode object makes the Unicode implementation more complex.

Until we drop legacy Unicode object, it is very hard to try other Unicode implementation like UTF-8 based implementation in PyPy.