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

[Charles-François Natali]

> 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.

Actually, there's Gregory's scandir() implementation (returning a
generator to be able to cope with large directories) on it's way:

http://bugs.python.org/issue11406

It's already been suggested to make it return a tuple (with d_type).
I'm sure a review of the code (especially the Windows implementation)
will be welcome.