Idea: Get count value from string representation

[lazytype]

At least in the version of Python I'm using (2.7.15), calling the builtin str function on an itertools.count object will return a string that looks like "count(0)". Parsing it out would be as simple as int(str(count)[6:-1]).

[jd]

Is that faster than the current implementation?

[lazytype]

I'd expect it to make FastWriteCounter faster since it would remove the need for a lock