On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:21 PM, Victor Stinner
Le 23/08/2011 15:06, "Martin v. Löwis" a écrit :
Well, things have to be done in order: 1. the PEP needs to be approved 2. the performance bottlenecks need to be identified 3. optimizations should be applied.
I would not vote for the PEP if it slows down Python, especially if it's much slower. But Torsten says that it speeds up Python, which is surprising. I have to do my own benchmarks :-)
As Martin noted, cache misses hurt performance so much on modern processors that making things use less memory overall can actually be a speed optimisation as well. Guessing where the remaining bottlenecks are is unlikely to be effective - profiling of the preliminary implementation will be needed. However, the idea that reducing the size of pure ASCII strings (which include all the identifiers in most code) by a factor of 2 or 4 (or so) results in a net speed increase definitely sounds plausible to me, even for non-string processing code. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia