[Python-Dev] Micro-optimizations by adding special-case bytecodes?

[Ben Hoyt]

> I don't want to discourage you, but this is unlikely to produce
> significant speedups on real-world code.  The simple reason is that
> comparing to None is not a bottleneck for any real application --
> comparing to None is probably damn fast compared to everything else
> the real application does.

That's true. However, I don't think that makes small optimizations
worthless. For example, the core devs speed up memory allocation or
method calls or whatever by a few percent, and consider it worthwhile,
because it all adds up.

> That said, it would be nice if you could get stable benchmark results
> to validate that theory (or not!) ;-)

Yep, I'm more than willing to accept that outcome if that's what the
results show! :-)

-Ben