[Python-Dev] [ANN] VPython 0.1

[J. Sievers]

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

> Daniel Stutzbach wrote:
>
>> With threaded code, every handler ends with its own dispatcher, so
>> the processor can make fine-grained predictions.
>
> I'm still wondering whether all this stuff makes a
> noticeable difference in real-life Python code, which
> spends most of its time doing expensive things like
> attribute lookups and function calls, rather than
> fiddling with integers in local variables.

Does it? Typically, VM interpreters spend a large percentage of their
cycles in opcode dispatch rather than opcode execution.
Running WITH_TSC compiled Python on some computation heavy application
(Mercurial maybe?) processing a typical workload would be interesting.

Also, I'd estimate that operations such as string concat and list
append (opcode BINARY_ADD) are fairly common, even in real-life Python
code.

Cheers,
-jakob