Should I pass py::list or py::list& to my function

[kriscao-cohere]

I'm trying to do some processing on a long Python list of long strings in C++, and so I have a C++ object whose constructor I'd like to take in a Python list, get an owning reference to it, and then start asynchronously doing processing on the list with the GIL released. However, I don't know whether I should type the Python list in the C++ constructor as py::list or py::list&.

Theoretically, a py::list should just be a pointer to a Python object in heap memory, so both should be memory equivalent, is my understanding correct? However, I don't quite understand how reference counting works, so I don't know which one would increment the ref count correctly for the lifetime of my C++ object.

[Ishu-opps]

Try py::list