having a build flag that compiles ids to straight C++ pointers would be useful for : - speed reasons : for an app that is stable and wants to get every last ounce of performance - helping drop object wrapping in PSEngine (see #114). once we have this, we can expose internal classes through SWIG without having to deal with template issues.

Javier, do we still want to do this? It seems like the PSEngine interface obviates this.

I think both reasons still aply : - even though PSEngine deals with naked pointers, many times it has to unwrap ids to put into collections, which introduces delays - many classes have method pairs where one method returns a pointer (for PSEngine) and the other an Id. It would be good to eliminate that redundancy. Figuring out how to pass Ids cleanly through SWIG, or compiling Ids as pointers are the 2 ways I can think of for achieving that.

at this point I care more about the method redundancy for SWIG wrapping, than any performance gains this may introduce, so if there is a better way to simplify SWIG wrapping, let's talk about it.