[Python-ideas] Dynamic getting of __doc__ of a function

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 1:56 AM Marko Ristin-Kaufmann
<marko.ristin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Crhis,
>
>> Have you tried just generating the docstrings at decoration time and
>> applying them? By the sound of it, they won't change after that, and
>> the only reason to run it later is performance... but have you
>> actually measured a performance hit resulting from that?
>
>
> I did. On my laptop (Intel i7-4700MQ), it takes about 4-12 milliseconds to parse and reformat a single condition lambda function of a contract. This quickly adds up to a couple of seconds if you have thousands of condition functions to parse. This might not be a problem for a limited code base, but I imagine that it could get inefficient very quickly as soon as the contract usage would spread to the dependencies as well. Not dead-slow inefficient, but inefficient enough to consider whether the automatic doc generation is worth it.
>

Thanks. Having actual numbers is helpful.

It may be worth looking into this as part of a broader lazy-generation
feature, as has recently been rolled out to annotations, and is
periodically discussed elsewhere.

ChrisA