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.