On Jun 8, 2016 8:13 AM, "Paul Sokolovsky" <pmiscml@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
On Wed, 8 Jun 2016 14:45:22 +0300 Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka@gmail.com> wrote:
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$ ./run-bench-tests bench/bytealloc* bench/bytealloc: 3.333s (+00.00%) bench/bytealloc-1-bytes_n.py 11.244s (+237.35%) bench/bytealloc-2-repeat.py
If the performance of creating an immutable array of n zero bytes is important in MicroPython, it is worth to optimize b"\0" * n.
No matter how you optimize calloc + something, it's always slower than just calloc.
`bytes(n)` *is* calloc + something. It's a lookup of and call to a global function. (Unless MicroPython optimizes away lookups for builtins, in which case it can theoretically optimize b"\0".__mul__.) On the other hand, b"\0" is a constant, and * is an operator lookup that succeeds on the first argument (meaning, perhaps, a successful branch prediction). As a constant, it is only created once, so there's no intermediate object created. AFAICT, the first requires optimizing global function lookups + calls, and the second requires optimizing lookup and *successful* application of __mul__ (versus failure + fallback to some __rmul__), and repetitions of a particular `bytes` object (which can be interned and checked against). That means there is room for either to win, depending on the efforts of the implementers. (However, `bytearray` has no syntax for literals (and therefore easy constants), and is a more valid and, AFAIK, more practical concern.)