list.pop(0) vs. collections.dequeue

[Steve Howell]

On Jan 24, 11:28 am, a... at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote:
> In article <b4440231-f33f-49e1-9d6f-5fbce0a63... at b2g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>,
> Steve Howell  <showel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> >Even with realloc()'s brokenness, you could improve pop(0) in a way
> >that does not impact list access at all, and the patch would not change
> >the time complexity of any operation; it would just add negligible
> >extract bookkeeping within list_resize() and a few other places.
>
> Again, your responsibility is to provide a patch and a spectrum of
> benchmarking tests to prove it.  Then you would still have to deal with
> the objection that extensions use the list internals -- that might be an
> okay sell given the effort otherwise required to port extensions to
> Python 3, but that's not the way to bet.
>

Ok, I just submitted a patch to python-dev that illustrates a 100x
speedup on an admittedly artificial program.  It still has a long way
to go, but it demonstrates proof of concept.  I'm done for the day,
but tomorrow I will try to polish it up and improve it, even if its
doomed for rejection.  Apologies to all I have offended in this
thread.  I frankly found some of the pushback to be a bit hasty and
disrespectful, but I certainly overreacted to some of the criticism.
And now I'm in the awkward position of asking the people I offended to
help me with the patch.  If anybody can offer me a hand in
understanding some of CPython's internals, particularly with regard to
memory management, it would be greatly appreciated.

(Sorry I don't have a link to the python-dev posting; it is not
showing up in the archives yet for some reason.)