[Python-Dev] Python 3 optimizations continued... (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Aug 30 02:55:10 CEST 2011

On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:00:28 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Having a word-sized "bytecode" format would probably be acceptable in > itself, so if you want to submit a patch for that, go ahead.

Although any such patch should discuss how it compares with Cesare's work on wpython. Personally, I like CPython fitting into the "simple-and-portable" niche in the Python interpreter space.

Changing the bytecode width wouldn't make the interpreter more complex.

Armin Rigo made the judgment years ago that CPython was a poor platform for serious optimisation when he stopped working on Psyco and started PyPy instead, and I think the contrasting fates of PyPy and Unladen Swallow have borne out that opinion.

Well, PyPy didn't show any significant achievements before they spent much more time on it than the Unladen Swallow guys did. Whether or not a good JIT is possible on top of CPython might remain a largely unanswered question.

Significantly increasing the complexity of CPython for speed-ups that are dwarfed by those available through PyPy seems like a poor trade-off to me.

Some years ago we were waiting for Unladen Swallow to improve itself and be ported to Python 3. Now it seems we are waiting for PyPy to be ported to Python 3. I'm not sure how "let's just wait" is a good trade-off if someone proposes interesting patches (which, of course, remains to be seen).

At a bare minimum, I don't think any significant changes should be made under the "it will be faster" justification until the bulk of the real-world benchmark suite used for speed.pypy.org is available for Python 3. (Wasn't there a GSoC project about that?)

I'm not sure what the bulk is, but have you already taken a look at http://hg.python.org/benchmarks/ ?

Regards

Antoine.

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