[Python-Dev] default of returning None hurts performance? (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Mon Aug 31 23:12:14 CEST 2009


food for thought as noticed by a coworker who has been profiling some hot code to optimize a library...

If a function does not have a return statement we return None. Ironically this makes the foo2 function below faster than the bar2 function at least as measured using bytecode size:

Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Jul 24 2009, 17:29:21) [GCC 4.2.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

import dis def foo(x): ... y = x() ... return y ... def foo2(x): ... return x() ... def bar(x): ... y = x() ... def bar2(x): ... x() ... dis.dis(foo) 2 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 3 CALL_FUNCTION 0 6 STORE_FAST 1 (y)

3 9 LOAD_FAST 1 (y) 12 RETURN_VALUE

dis.dis(foo2) 2 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 3 CALL_FUNCTION 0 6 RETURN_VALUE dis.dis(bar) 2 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 3 CALL_FUNCTION 0 6 STORE_FAST 1 (y) 9 LOAD_CONST 0 (None) 12 RETURN_VALUE dis.dis(bar2) 2 0 LOAD_FAST 0 (x) 3 CALL_FUNCTION 0 6 POP_TOP 7 LOAD_CONST 0 (None) 10 RETURN_VALUE -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20090831/e72e1f18/attachment.htm>



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