[Python-Dev] PEP 351, the freeze protocol

[Noam Raphael]

I thought about something -
>
> I think that the performance penalty may be rather small - remember
> that in programs which do not change strings, there would never be a
> need to copy the string data at all. And since I think that usually
> most of the dict lookups are for method or function names, there would
> almost never be a need to constuct a new object on dict lookup,
> because you search for the same names again and again, and a new
> object is created only on the first frozen() call. You might even gain
> performance, because s += x would be faster.
>
Name lookups can take virtually the same time they take now - method
names can be saved from the beginning as frozen strings, so finding
them in a dict will take just another bit test - is the object frozen
- before doing exactly what is done now. Remember, the strings we are
familiar with are simply frozen strings...