[Python-Dev] PEP 428: stat caching undesirable?

[Ben Hoyt]

We can get a greater speed up for walkdir() without resorting to

> caching, too. Some operating systems and file system report the file
> type in the dirent struct that is returned by readdir(). This reduces
> the number of stat calls to zero.
>

Yes, definitely. This is exactly what my os.walk() replacement,
"Betterwalk", does:
https://github.com/benhoyt/betterwalk#readme

On Windows you get *all* stat information from iterating the directory
entries (FindFirstFile etc). And on Linux most of the time you get enough
for os.walk() not to need an extra stat (though it does depend on the file
system).

I still hope to clean up Betterwalk and make a C version so we can use it
in the standard library. In many cases it speeds up os.walk() by several
times, even an order of magnitude in some cases. I intend for it to be a
drop-in replacement for os.walk(), just faster.

-Ben
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