[Python-Dev] Rethinking intern() and its data structure (original) (raw)

Jeffrey Yasskin jyasskin at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 06:04:09 CEST 2009

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 6:24 PM, John Arbash Meinel <john.arbash.meinel at gmail.com> wrote:

Greg Ewing wrote:

John Arbash Meinel wrote:

And the way intern is currently written, there is a third cost when the item doesn't exist yet, which is another lookup to insert the object.

That's even rarer still, since it only happens the first time you load a piece of code that uses a given variable name anywhere in any module. Somewhat true, though I know it happens 25k times during startup of bzr... And I would be a lot happier if startup time was 100ms instead of 400ms.

I think you have plenty of a case to try it out. If you code it up and it doesn't speed anything up, well then we've learned something, and maybe it'll be useful anyway for the memory savings. If it does speed things up, well then Python's faster. I wouldn't waste time arguing about it before you have the change written.

Good luck! Jeffrey

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