Hey all-

I'm doing some performance-critical Python work and want to create a function that removes a few elements from a list if they meet certain criteria. I'd rather not create any copies of the list because it's filled with a lot of really large objects.

Functionality I want to implement:

def listCleanup(listOfElements):
    i = 0
    for element in listOfElements:
        if(element.meetsCriteria()):
            del(listOfElements[i])
        i += 1
    return listOfElements

myList = range(10000)
myList = listCleanup(listOfElements)

I'm not familiar with the low-level workings of Python. Is myList being passed by value or by reference?

How can I make this faster?

Is it possible to somehow extend the list class and implement listCleanup() within that?

myList = range(10000)
myList.listCleanup()

Thanks-

Jonathan