[Python-Dev] Re: acceptability of asm in python code? (original) (raw)

David Eppstein eppstein@ics.uci.edu
Sat, 08 Mar 2003 21:33:06 -0800

In article <000501c2e5f8$c384b6e0$6401a8c0@damien>, "damien morton" <dmorton@bitfurnace.com> wrote:

> If you had said "a huge speedup, on all programs", on the > weak end of maybe. "Small speedup" isn't worth the obscurity. > Note that Python contains no assembler now.

Its arguable which is more obscure, the x86 assembly instruction "jo" (jump if overflow), or the xor trickery in C. I take your point, though, about there being no assembly in python now.

The place to put this sort of low-level instruction optimization is in the peepholer of your C compiler.

-- David Eppstein http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science