Performance of int/long in Python 3

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:58:11 +0100, Steve Simmons wrote:

> It seems to me that jmf *might* be moving towards a vindicated position.
>  There is some interest now in duplicating, understanding and
> (hopefully!) extending his test results, which can only be a Good Thing
> - whatever the outcome and wherever the facepalm might land.

Some interest "now"? Oh please.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-September/629810.html

Mark Lawrence even created a bug report to track this, also back in 
September.

http://bugs.python.org/issue16061

I'm sure you didn't intend to be insulting, but some of us *have* taken 
JMF seriously, at least at first. His repeated overblown claims of how 
Python is destroying Unicode, his lack of acknowledgement that other 
people have seen string handling *speed up* not slow down, and his 
refusal to assist in diagnosing this performance regression except to 
repeatedly quote the same artificial micro-benchmarks over and over again 
have lost him whatever credibility he started with.

This feature is a *memory optimization*, not a speed optimization, and 
yet as a side-effect of saving memory, it also saves time. Real-world 
benchmarks of actual applications demonstrate this. One or two trivial 
slowdowns of artificial micro-benchmarks simply are not important, even 
if they are genuine. I believe they are genuine, but likely operating 
system and hardware dependent.


-- 
Steven