[Python-ideas] Object grabbing (was: Re: Python-ideas Digest, Vol 114, Issue 5)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On May 2, 2016 7:55 AM, "Robert van Geel" <robert at bign.nl> wrote:
>
> I'm receiving digests and seem to not have each individual mail, so
here's a digested response:
>
> One side of this that's not discussed is the possible optimization. I can
imagine if you've got a lot of objectproperty write and -reads this could
actually make certain use cases a lot faster such as this one, saving 6
opcodes:
>
> def __init__(self, left, top, width, height, content):
>     self.left = left
>     self.top = top
>     self.width = width
>     self.height = height
>     self.content = content.upper()
>     self.decideColors()
>     self.draw()
>
> versus:
>
> def __init__(self, left, top, width, height, content):
>     with self:
>         .left = left
>         .top = top
>         .width = width
>         .height = height
>         .content = content.upper()
>         .decideColors()
>         .draw()
>
> The suggestion that you could accomplish this with a (peephole) optimizer
does not seem quite correct to me:
>
> x = myobject.b()
> ...
> z = myobject.c()
>
> does not necessarily have a consistent pointer to myobject although it
would require some acrobatics to change them in a way that can not be seen
by an optimizer.
> You can think about exec() or even another thread intervening into a
generator function, not something I would do but who knows.

It's actually part of CPython's current semantics that local variables
cannot be modified via stack introspection exactly because it allows
certain optimizations. You can read them, it might look like you can touch
them (you can get access to what's allegedly the real dict of locals), but
this is an illusion: modifications to that dict are not reflected back to
the running code. See PyFrame_LocalsToFast and vice versa. So teaching the
peephole optimizer to do this would be legal afaict.

I'd be surprised and interested to see an example where those 6 opcodes
made any non-trivial difference to a real program though -- thanks to the
above-mentioned optimizations, accessing a local variable is already one of
CPython's fastest operations.

-n
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20160502/a8c38a46/attachment.html>