[Chicago] help from Django and Pylons developers

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Mon Apr 28 21:30:02 CEST 2008


Massimo Di Pierro wrote:
> The speedup is not because of the bytecode compilation. But in order to 
> bytecode compile web2py parses the templates and resolves all the 
> includes and extend thus turning the entire template hierarchy for each 
> page into a single python file which is then bytecode compiled. My users 
> see a lot of speedup. In particular those users who run on smartphones 
> and other platforms like the Nokia N800. I do not know whether Make does 
> the same (that is why I asked) but probably now if you say there is no 
> speed-up.

Mako doesn't resolve inheritance into a single file, but that's just a 
single function call overhead.  There's lots of possible performance 
hacks along those lines in Python, some of which are helpful and some of 
which aren't that helpful.  I would be quite surprised if that 
particular optimization is noticeable.  Mako does bytecode compile all 
components that make up a template.

If you want to measure performance, then measure performance.  The 
Genshi people have set up some common benchmark infrastructure for 
Python templating languages, you could get web2py's templating language 
setup in that system.  If you are particularly interested in performance 
it could be a useful basis for improving performance (which was the 
original reason for setting it up, as Genshi developers wanted some 
baseline for measuring their own performance improvements).

Another concern is the debuggability of templates: how do they show up 
in tracebacks?  I consider this a fairly important feature of templating 
languages.  From what I saw in web2py, it looks like you have to infer 
the corresponding template code from the Python translated source.  Mako 
doesn't make this compromise, even for compiled templates, and so among 
other things it can't compile multiple files down to a single file.

> I updated the document based on your original comments but I have a 
> philosophical question: if a feature is not documented and there is no 
> example, is it really there?

Well, it is documented *somewhere*.  Pylons does have a problem with 
fractured documentation, spread out over several projects.  I won't 
argue with that criticism, and there is effort going on to fix this. 
But if you remove every feature with no easily accessible documentation, 
then Pylons kind of disappears ;)

-- 
Ian Bicking : ianb at colorstudy.com : http://blog.ianbicking.org


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