@picnixz@rruuaanng@ZeroIntensity: I addressed your comments. Please review the updated PR.

Maybe you are right, But you can consider my suggestion.

I createdcapi-workgroup/decisions#43 issue in the C API Working Group.

I wrote a microbenchmark comparingequal strings of 10 characters:

• bench.patch
• bench.py

Results on Fedora 40 with CPU isolation:

• (private) _PyUnicode_EQ: Mean +- std dev:9.71 ns +- 0.04 ns
• (private) _PyUnicode_Equal: Mean +- std dev:8.75 ns +- 0.01 ns
• (public) PyUnicode_Equal: Mean +- std dev:9.14 ns +- 0.02 ns
• (public) PyUnicode_Compare: Mean +- std dev:11.1 ns +- 0.1 ns
• (public) PyUnicode_RichCompare: Mean +- std dev:12.2 ns +- 0.0 ns

Proposed publicPyUnicode_Equal() is1.2x faster thanPyUnicode_Compare() (-2.0 ns) and 1.3x faster thanPyUnicode_RichCompare() (-3.1 ns).

Private_PyUnicode_EQ() and private_PyUnicode_Equal() are not exactly the same implementation, it seems like private_PyUnicode_Equal() is a little bit faster (1 ns!).

Microbenchmark on comparison ofinequal strings of 10 characters, only the last character is different.

• (private)_PyUnicode_EQ: Mean +- std dev:10.0 ns +- 0.0 ns
• (private)_PyUnicode_Equal: Mean +- std dev:9.18 ns +- 0.00 ns
• (public)PyUnicode_Equal: Mean +- std dev:10.1 ns +- 0.0 ns
• (public)PyUnicode_Compare: Mean +- std dev:10.9 ns +- 0.0 ns
• (public)PyUnicode_RichCompare: Mean +- std dev:13.1 ns +- 0.0 ns

I createdcapi-workgroup/decisions#43 issue in the C API Working Group.

The C API Working Group approved the API.

Merged. Thanks for reviews@picnixz and@ZeroIntensity.