[Python-Dev] Making builtins more efficient
Phillip J. Eby
pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Mar 9 16:27:18 CET 2006
At 08:50 AM 3/9/2006 -0600, Steven Elliott wrote:
>I believe that currently "mod.str = my_str" alters the module's global
>hash table (f->f_globals in the code). One way of handling it is to
>alter STORE_ATTR (op code for assigning to mod.str) to always check to
>see if the key being assigned is one of the default builtins. If it is,
>then the module's indexed array of builtins is assigned to.
It's not the opcode that would change, it's the C function referenced by
the module type's tp_setattro function slot. This has already been
attempted before, in order to implement a warning for this behavior. You
might want to research that, because the patch ended up being backed out
for some reason. I think it ended up being too strict of a check to be
accepted for Python 2.4.
If some version of it could come back, however, it's possible we could use
this in Python 2.5 to allow -O compilation to assume that unshadowed
builtins are static, making it potentially possible to convert some of them
to specialized bytecodes, or perhaps a "BUILTIN_OP n" bytecode, where 'n'
is a combination of an operation selector and the number of arguments to be
taken from the stack.
The determination of "unshadowed" would have to be conservative, in that
'from foo import *' might shadow a builtin, so using 'import *' would
disable optimization of all builtins. However, if that were not present,
and there's no statically detectable assignment shadowing a particular
builtin, that builtin could be optimized. (Assuming -O, of course.)
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