[Python-Dev] pprint(iterator) (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Feb 2 21:50:43 CET 2009

Tres Seaver wrote:

Nick Coghlan wrote:

(and don't worry too much about 3 - it will give me an opportunity to road test the functools patch by using it to refactor pprint and check the performance implications) /me wonders about the performance-criticality of anything using 'pprint'. Or were you just planning to use it as a means to benchmark the 'simplegeneric' stuff? I would think something with a lot lower intrinsic overhead would be a better benchmark target.

Don't read too much into that comment - generics make the most sense in cases (like pprint) where extensibility is a more important feature than raw speed. I'm talking about more subjective impressions of performance as well as things like "if I register a handler for Sequence, is there any performance advantage in registering direct handlers for the builtin subclasses?".

Really drastic performance degradations would be on the radar as well - slowing pprint() down by 10% is unlikely to bother anyone, but slowing it down by 100% would be a bad thing (not that I think such a degradation is likely, I'm just trying to give an impression of the magnitude of change I'll be trying to measure).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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