[pypy-dev] Performance, json and standard library

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sat, 24 Sep 2011 14:47:33 +0200, Maciej Fijalkowski writes:
>Hello.
>
>I would like to raise the topic of modifying standard library for
>performance reasons in *some* places. I know the policy so far is to
>avoid modifications as much as possible and in general I agree. For
>example the changes justinpeel made to bz2 (or tarfile? please remind
>me about details) were not good, since it seems equivalent changes can
>be achieved by tweaking the JIT.
>
>However, json comes to mind. The situation is as follows:
>
>* json in stdlib is some old version of simplejson
>* simplejson has been played with to improve the performance on top of py
>py
>* there are reports that relatively simple changes will improve
>performance: https://bugs.pypy.org/issue868
>* json in stdlib will *not* be updated for 2.7 series and even if it
>gets updated for 3.x it'll be incompatible
>
>So while I agree that ideally, JIT could handle whatever it has, but
>maybe json is an example good enough to warrant changes. There are
>people out there who would base migration to pypy on json performance
>for example.
>
>Any opinions?
>
>Cheers,
>fijal

I am at PyCON UK right now.  I have already had 4 conversations with people who
badly want better json performance.  (And one person who says zip performance
bad, is it?  I told him to write a bug report), and its only lunch time of
day 1 of the con.  Faster json thus appears to be an itch that needs a lot of 
scratching around here.

Laura