[Python-Dev] SEEK_* constants in io and os

[Eli Bendersky]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 1:24 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> Le Sun, 1 Sep 2013 18:02:30 -0700,
> Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> a écrit :
> > Hello,
> >
> > I was looking at the possibility of replacing the SEEK_* constants by
> > IntEnums, and the first thing that catches attention is that these
> > constants are defined in both Lib/os.py and Lib/io.py; both places
> > also recently started supporting SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA (though here
> > io refers to os.SEEK_HOLE and os.SEEK_DATA).
>
> What is the runtime cost of doing so? os is a fundamental module that is
> imported by almost every Python program.
>

Theoretically, it should be very low given that we just need to add an
import and define one class. os already does a number of things in its
toplevel (mostly a few imports which transitively do other things).
Compounded with import caching, since this is done just once per run,
doesn't seem like a problem.

Empirically, I tried measuring it but I can't discern a difference
with/without translating SEEK_* to enums. There's a fluctuation of ~1usec
which I can't distinguish from noise. Let me know if you have a good
methodology of benchmarking these things

Eli
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