[Python-Dev] PEP 393 Summer of Code Project

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:21 PM, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at haypocalc.com> wrote:
> Le 23/08/2011 15:06, "Martin v. Löwis" a écrit :
>>
>> Well, things have to be done in order:
>> 1. the PEP needs to be approved
>> 2. the performance bottlenecks need to be identified
>> 3. optimizations should be applied.
>
> I would not vote for the PEP if it slows down Python, especially if it's
> much slower. But Torsten says that it speeds up Python, which is surprising.
> I have to do my own benchmarks :-)

As Martin noted, cache misses hurt performance so much on modern
processors that making things use less memory overall can actually be
a speed optimisation as well. Guessing where the remaining bottlenecks
are is unlikely to be effective - profiling of the preliminary
implementation will be needed.

However, the idea that reducing the size of pure ASCII strings (which
include all the identifiers in most code) by a factor of 2 or 4 (or
so) results in a net speed increase definitely sounds plausible to me,
even for non-string processing code.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia