[Python-3000] C API for ints and strings (original) (raw)

Nicholas Bastin nick.bastin at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 05:53:53 CEST 2007

On 9/9/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On 9/9/07, Nicholas Bastin <nick.bastin at gmail.com> wrote: > I'm not suggesting that Python handle small ints itself and then farm > out large integer computations, I'm suggesting that since we've > already coalesced small ints into 'large' ones, we might want to > review the performance implications of that decision, and possibly > consider that other people have already solved this problem. Clearly > GMP appears to fail on a technical level, but there might be other > options worth investigating.

The performance problems that are affecting us most are for small-value ints. The old PyInt type has many custom optimizations to help. I think we could do worse than re-introducing some of the same tricks, retargeted to PyLong (which never got much attention for small-value performance).

I did redo my benchmark using 200 as the increment number instead of 1, to duck any impact from the interning of small value ints in 2.6, and it made no discernible difference in the results.

-- Nick

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