[Python-ideas] Length hinting and preallocation for container types

[Alex Stewart]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:

> So, that's a 1.8% speedup. While doing things right gives a 20% speedup:
>
> $ python3.3 -m timeit -n1000 "l=[]" "app = l.append" "for i in
> range(10000): app(i)"
> 1000 loops, best of 3: 557 usec per loop
> $ python3.3 -m timeit -n1000 "l = [i for i in range(10000)]"
> 1000 loops, best of 3: 447 usec per loop
>

Yeah, I think it's pretty likely that any case where the proposed change
would be applicable is probably going to be dominated by other factors more
than by allocation overhead anyway..

The above does beg the question, though:  Could we perhaps apply some of
this thinking to list comprehensions, and speed them up even more by
automatically taking hints from the inputs and preallocating the output
list? (or do we already?)

Not sure how much work that would be, or whether it would be worth it..
just a random thought..

--Alex
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