On 10/11/2016 2:30 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
On 11 October 2016 at 17:49, Nick Coghlan ncoghlan@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 October 2016 at 02:16, Elliot Gorokhovsky elliot.gorokhovsky@gmail.com wrote:
So I thought, wow, this will give some nice numbers! But I underestimated the power of this optimization. You have no idea. It's crazy. This is just insane. This is crazy.
Not to take away from the potential for speed improvements (which do indeed seem interesting), but I'd ask that folks avoid using mental health terms to describe test results that we find unbelievable. There are plenty of other adjectives we can use, and a text-based medium like email gives us a chance to proofread our posts before we send them.
I'd also suggest toning down the rhetoric a bit (all-caps title, "the contents of this message may be dangerous for readers with heart conditions" etc.
I triple the motion. In general, all caps = spam or worse and I usually don't even open such posts. Elliot, to me, all caps means IGNORE ME. I suspect this is not what you want.
Your results do seem good, but it's a little hard to work out what you actually did, and how your results were produced, through the hype. It'll be much better when someone else has a means to reproduce your results to confirm them. In all honestly, people have been working on Python's performance for a long time now, and I'm more inclined to think that a 50% speedup is a mistake rather than an opportunity that's been missed for all that time. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but for now I'm skeptical.
I'm not, in the same sense, even though Elliot suggested that we should be ;-). His key insight is that if all members of a list have the same type (which is a common 'special case'), then we can replace the general, somewhat convoluted, rich-comparison function, containing at least two type checks, with a faster special-case comparison function without any type checks. Since Python floats wrap machine doubles, I expect that float may have the greatest speedup.
Please continue working on this - I'd love my skepticism to be proved wrong!
It may be the case now that sorting a list of all floats is faster than a mixed list of ints and floats. I expect that it definitely will be with a float comparison function.