(FAT Python: http://faster-cpython.readthedocs.org/fat_python.html)
FAT Python uses guards to check whether a global name (for example, the name for a function) has changed its value. Idea: If you know exactly which function will be called, you can also optimize based on the properties of that function.
According to Eli Bendersky's 2012 blog post[1] (which might be outdated), a function call with keyword arguments is potentially slower than one with only positional arguments.
""" If the function in question accepts no arguments (marked by the METH_NOARGS flag when the function is created) or just a single object argument (METH_0 flag), call_function doesn't go through the usual argument packing and can call the underlying function pointer directly.
...
do_call ... implements the most generic form of calling. However, there's one more optimization - if func is a PyFunction (an object used internally to represent functions defined in Python code), a separate path is taken - fast_function.
...
... PyCFunction objects that do [receive] keyword arguments [use do_call instead of fast_function]. A curious aspect of this fact is that it's somewhat more efficient to not pass keyword arguments to C functions that either accept them or are fine with just positional arguments. """
So maybe, in a function which uses FAT Python's guards, we can replace some of the keyworded-calls to global function with positional-only calls. It might be a micro-optimization, but it's one that the Python programmer doesn't have to worry about.
Concerns: 1. Is it possible to correctly determine, for a given function, which positional parameters have which names? 2. Is it possible to change a function object's named parameters some time after it's created (and inspected)?
PS: I didn't feel like this was appropriate for either of Victor's running PEP threads, and the third milestone thread is in the previous month's archives, so I thought that making a new thread would be best.
[1] http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/03/23/python-internals-how-callables-work