[Python-3000] Function call speed (Was: Cleaning up argument list parsing)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Mon Apr 17 21:42:59 CEST 2006


On 4/17/06, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> "Talin" <talin at acm.org> wrote in message
> news:loom.20060417T072709-664 at post.gmane.org...
> > The important thing is that the behavior be clear and unambiguous,
> > which I think this is.
>
> Many would also prefer that functions calls not become noticeable slower
> than they already are.

How slow *are* function calls? There seems to be a common "function
calls in Python are slow" meme. It's never been a significant issue
for me, but my code is pretty much always IO-bound, so that doesn't
surprise me. Are they slow enough to warrant serious effort to speed
them up?

More specifically (and more on-topic :-)) is there any room for
speeding up function calls in Python 3000? Given that pure performance
improvements are clearly OK for 2.x, I'm thinking of cases where it
would be necessary to impose language-level restrictions to ease the
optimisation process.

Paul.


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