Thomas Wouters suggested an obvious improvement to unicode_eq():

use memcmp().

diff --git a/Objects/dictobject.c b/Objects/dictobject.c
index 8d8a882611e978dbddeeed60c5e1f1c511653a19..957090f19142f9632221dd56c680ecc872ed1ce8 100644 (file)
--- a/Objects/dictobject.c
+++ b/Objects/dictobject.c
@@ -340,7 +340,7 @@ unicode_eq(PyObject *aa, PyObject *bb)
                return 0;
        if (a->length == 1)
                return 1;
-       return PyUnicode_Compare(aa, bb) == 0;
+       return memcmp(a->str, b->str, a->length * sizeof(Py_UNICODE)) == 0;
 }