[Python-Dev] Optimize Python long integers (original) (raw)

Thomas Wouters thomas at python.org
Tue Nov 11 23:40:05 CET 2008

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 14:25, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at haypocalc.com>wrote:

There are some very interesting propositions (with patches!) to optimize Python int and long types (especially the long integers).

Here's another one: http://code.python.org/loggerhead/users/twouters/intopt-- integer inlining through pointer tagging trickery. In Python 2.6 it costs 2-4% overall performance but increases integer arithmetic (in the range [-0x40000000, 0x40000000) only) by 10-20% according to my rough measurements (I haven't tried your benchmark yet.) I haven't ported it to 3.0 but it should provide a bigger win there. It also breaks API compatibility in a few ways: Py_TYPE(o) and Py_REFCNT(o) are no longer valid lvalues, and they and Py_INCREF(o) and Py_DECREF(o) may all evaluate 'o' twice. And, worst of all, it exposes the tagged pointers to third-party extensions, so anything not doing typechecks with Py_TYPE(o) will likely cause buserrors.

In retrospect, perhaps this is too controversial to be added to the list ;-) I don't really expect this to be something CPython would want to use as-is, although there may be use for tagged pointers in more controlled environments (like function locals.)

-- Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org>

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