Is it possible to cast "PyObject*" to "object" without incrementing refcount?

Let’s suppose I have a C function that returns a NEW reference to PyObject. And then I want to call it and return it’s result from a function that returns object. Currently if I simply do something like this:

def pyfunc():
    return <object>PyDict_New()

There will be refcount increment in the generated pyfunc() code for the returned dict which is undesirable.

My question is - is there a canonical solution to this problem?

[scoder]

You should really use return {} instead.

Apart from that, the whole point of object is to be refcounted. That is the difference to PyObject*, which is a pointer.

My guess is that you declared PyDict_New() as returning a PyObject*. That is incorrect. It returns an owned reference, i.e. object.

[scoder]

What would you say about functions like PyTuple_GET_ITEM()? Is it normal to use them? I’ve found out that writing them by hand in Cython files gives slight speed advantage.

Have you tried @boundscheck(False)? That’s more likely to make a difference here than the reference counting.