[Python-Dev] Judy for replacing internal dictionaries?

[Sean Reifschneider]

Recently at a Hacking Society meeting someone was working on packaging Judy
for Debian.  Apparently, Judy is a data-structure designed by some
researchers at Hewlett-Packard.  It's goal is to be a very fast
implementation of an associative array or (possibly sparse) integer indexed
array.

Judy has recently been released under the LGPL.

After reding the FAQ and 10 minute introduction, I started wondering about
wether it could improve the overall performance of Python by replacing
dictionaries used for namespaces, classes, etc...  Since then, I've
realized that I probably won't have time to do the implementation any time
soon, and Evelyn urged me to bring it up here.

I realize that Python's dictionaries are fairly well optimized.  It sounds
like Judy may be even faster though.  It apparently works fairly hard at
reducing L2 cache misses, for example.

Some URLs:
   Judy FAQ:
      http://atwnt909.external.hp.com/dspp/tech/tech_TechDocumentDetailPage_IDX/1,1701,1949,00.html

   Judy 10 minute introduction:
      http://atwnt909.external.hp.com/dspp/ddl/ddl_Download_File_TRX/1,1249,702,00.pdf

   SourceForge Project Page:
      http://sourceforge.net/projects/judy/

Sean
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Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
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