On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Gregory P. Smith<greg@krypto.org> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Gregory P. Smith <greg <at> krypto.org> writes:
food for thought as noticed by a coworker who has been profiling some hot code
to optimize a library...If a function does not have a return statement we return None. Ironically this makes the foo2 function below faster than the bar2 function at least as measured using bytecode size
I would be surprised if this "bytecode size" difference made a significant difference in runtimes, given that function call cost should dwarf the cumulated cost of POP_TOP and LOAD_CONST (two of the simplest opcodes you could find).
the attached sample code repeatably shows that it makes a difference though its really not much of one (2-3%).
I was just wondering if a bytecode for a superinstruction of the common sequence:
6 POP_TOP 7 LOAD_CONST 0 (None) 10 RETURN_VALUE
might be worth it.
I doubt it. You'd save a bit of stack manipulation, but since this will only appear at the end of a function, I'd be skeptical that this would make any macrobenchmarks (statistically) significantly faster. Collin Winter